![]() ![]() I first read it even later than most – towards the end of my 30s. The British generally come to the book later than the French. What John Fowles called "the greatest novel of adolescence in European literature" can only ever be partly grasped by adolescents, because they don't yet know exactly what it is they are going to lose by growing up. This may stem from an understandable reluctance to revisit set texts but more, perhaps, from a fear that the novel's magic might not work a second time around – as if, in adulthood, we know too much to fall under the its spell again. Most French people read it at school yet very few of them (according to my own private poll) ever reread it. ![]() ![]() A poll of French readers a dozen years ago placed it sixth of all 20th-century books, just behind Proust and Camus. There is no doubting the classic status of Alain-Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes. ![]()
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