In the Library
The Counterfeiters
André Gide, 1925
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 8.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Dorothy Bussy
- Chapters
- Chapters 49
- Length
- Length 120k words
£1.99
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Has it ever happened to you to hold a counterfeit coin in your hands?
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About the book
A shopkeeper presses a coin into a schoolboy's palm, and the boy bites down on it without thinking, the old test for gold, only to feel his teeth sink into glass dressed up in gilt. André Gide built his one true novel around that counterfeit coin, and around everything else in it that passes itself off as real: a boy who discovers his whole name is a forgery, a young man who cannot tell his love for another from his performance of it, a novelist named Édouard who is, in these very pages, writing a novel called The Counterfeiters about people almost exactly like the ones around him. The book folds back on its own making until you cannot find the seam. And beneath the mirrors, something plainly, terribly real: a schoolboy's secret pact, sealed by a pistol a boy his age dares him to fire at his own head. Gide spent a lifetime distrusting the well-made novel. Here he broke it apart and, from the pieces, told the truth anyway.