Synopsis
From the author of the celebrated Fields of Glory and Of Illustrious Men comes the novel that completes the trilogy of a young man's education and a nation's destiny. The World More or Less completes Jean Rouaud's celebrated autobiographical trilogy about his family and his journey toward becoming a writer--a trilogy that began with Fields of Glory(winner of the Goncourt Prize), followed by Of Illustrious Men. Again the setting is the lower Loire Valley in France, a place of rains and mists, and again Rouaud envelopes the reader in prose so powerfully resonant that it lingers in the mind long after the last page. Rouaud has established himself as one of France's most beloved writers. The novel tells the story of a young man caught between adolescent self-pity and adult self acceptance. For him the world is both hostile and enticing; he is at a crossroads. Awkward, dreamy, lonely, longing, still grieving for the deaths of his father, grandfather, and aunt, he is also very nearsighted. This gives him a sort of double vision: putting on his glasses brings the world into focus, taking them off blurs it. Our view of him, too, is double, one of proximity and distance, for it is formed by the young man's searing self-scrutiny and the writer-to-be's maturer judgment. Sharing this more-or-less world are Theo and Gyf, lover and friend, one whose life is a mystery, the other who wants to capture life's mystery on film. The World More or Less is a portrait of the artist as a young man, a novel with echoes of The Catcher in the Rye and Flaubert's Sentimental Education. Rouaud's ability to evoke the past is incandescent, and this work, like the other two in the trilogy, is a magnificent feat of imaginative sympathy and unsparing honesty. At bottom the novel is about learning to see, and the lenses we put on to view the world, with all its heartbreaks and glorious possibilities.
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