Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Strait Is the Gate by André Gide Strait Is the Gate by André Gide. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 655981326f48f210 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Strait Is the Gate by André Gide. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 65598132680316a1 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Strait is the gate summary. What Does The Bible Mean by the Straight Gate & Narrow Way. Strait is the Gate. Strait is the Gate was his first novel: not that he was any spring chicken, at 40, when he wrote it. The first thought I had about it was that the title is in serious need of retranslation. And what sort of a word is strait anyway? Has it ever been in normal use as a plain adjective in the 99 years since the book was published? Not that I have an immediately better alternative. The reader already can sense that this firm dedication to the narrow, difficult way, with resistance to temptation, can as easily become a matter for pride and piety as humility and holiness. The obvious message of the dangers of piety is pretty clear too. Post a Comment. Saturday, February 23, book review - Strait is the Gate. There is a style of writing that sets up a character to embody an argument as a way of life and Andre Gide delivers a great example of that here. Where there should be happiness and love there is despair and death. Ironically the reason for it is because of a zealous devotion to God. This is a book about the sort of religious devotion that causes people to become martyrs and lose out on happiness because it is somehow sinful to enjoy life. In a nutshell this is a love story about a boy - Jerome - and a girl — Alissa - who grow up to become a man and a woman. See a Problem?

변함없는 사랑은 가능한가? - 좁은문 Strait is the Gate 앙드레 지드 André Gide # 인문학 Humanities. By implication Gide's text had rejected it. It is the story of Jerome, told 13 years later, and of his love as a young adolescent for his cousin Alissa, who turns him down, wastes away, and finally dies. The ambiguities are carefully built up. Gide uses a narrator speaking directly in the first person. His feelings are too involved in the narration for his judgments to be accepted without reflection, however, even now that he is no longer young. It was translated into English by Dorothy Bussy. It probes the complexities and terrors of adolescence and growing up. Based on a Freudian interpretation, the story uses the influences of childhood experience and the misunderstandings that can arise between two people. Strait is the Gate taps the unassuaged memory of Gide's unsuccessful wooing of his cousin between and Much of the story is written as an epistolary novel between the Protagonist Jerome and his love Alissa. It is one of the first of his works to treat the problems of human relationships. The work contrasts the yearning toward asceticism and self-sacrifice with the need for sensual exploration as a young woman struggles with conflicting feelings about the man who wants to marry her. Strait Is the Gate. Info Print Cite. Submit Feedback. Thank you for your feedback. Strait Is the Gate by André Gide. Comments by Bob Corbett February 2014. The story is narrated by Jerome Palissier, but it turns out to actually be more about his beloved, Alissa, than about him, and about the nature of their relationship. At the same time there is a much larger frame of meaning that is going on in the novel. The Bucolin family of southern France has three children, Robert, a bit of a loser of a fellow, Juliette, a very beautiful girl about the same age as Jerome, and her older sister Alissa. In the early part of the novel we follow the four children primarily as they grow up and are very close. They are first cousins as well. Early on Jerome falls madly in love with Alissa, yet unbeknownst to him, Juliette loves him. Also early on the Lucile Bucolin, the mother of the girls, runs off and leaves their father with the three children. She is a spirited and beautiful woman from Martinique, and not cut out for the sober domesticated wife of the Bucolins. This abandonment of the children and betrayal of their father has a life-long impact on Alissa and is the driving event in shaping her future actions. As the children grow into young adulthood we learn from our narrator, Jerome, that he is madly in love with Alissa, and that many in the family just sort of expect these two will marry. He doesn�t realize that Juliette, who, while not his beloved, is a very dear cousin to him, is in love with him. However, Alissa does know, and behaves with careful propriety when with Jerome. Jerome and Alissa seem to be quite intellectually oriented, which Juliette is not, and much of the joy the between Jerome and Alissa centers on intellectual themes and literature, poetry and other books. Nonetheless, Alissa is quite aware of Juliette�s love of Jerome, though Jerome has no idea. As they grow up he is trying to get his courage up to ask Alissa to at least be engaged to him, even though he plans to go away for university and they wouldn�t marry for some years. He moves closer and closer to popping the question, but both Alissa and Juliette are very nervous about it, Alissa since she knows how much Juliette loves him, and also knows, without his every having explicitly declared it, that he expects Alissa will be his love. Alissa has been deeply affected by her mother�s desertion of the family and infidelity to their father. Quietly, without even Jerome knowing, she has turned to religion and has been deeply influenced by Pascal and his version of Jansenism which runs through his works. This is a strict doctrine which in its influence on Alissa emphasizes original sin and the basic depravity of human beings. She embraces the notion that humans require the grace of God to be saved, and that the individual�s fate is predestined. Without anyone knowing, including Jerome and Juliette, she realizes she cannot bask in the love of Jerome, but must only love God in this ultimate way. In the early days she does know of her sister�s love of Jerome and wants to step aside so that they will marry. However, the family arranges a marriage for Juliette to a decent man who is not only older than her, but whom she doesn�t love. The suitor pushes his case and Juliette�s father agrees. Much to her devastation, she is married to the suitor. Now Alissa is in a more difficult situation. She can�t any longer simply be the martyr giving up her beloved for her sister, but she increasingly feels she must make a choice to either love God or to love Jerome, but in her Pascal/Jansenistic influences she believes she can�t both adequately love God and Jerome in the same way. Jerome knows nothing of this inner life of Alissa, and can�t really figure out what is going on with her and why she can�t just return his love which he does show passionately, and she appears to love him as well. At the same time, it is important to note that he seems much more in love with the ideal image he has created of Alissa than the troubled Alissa whom he should know so well. This gap in his understanding is partly his own idealization of Alissa, and her partly careful deception of him about her inner life struggles which she never reveals. As they grow older, and especially after Juliette settles in with her new husband and comes to love him and their growing batch of children, the difficulties with the love affair between Jerome and Alissa becomes more and more difficult for them to understand. Jerome can�t imagine why Alissa is so resistant of at least making plans for marriage, especially since she constantly professes her profound love of him. On her side Alissa hides much of her inner-life from him, particularly the influence of Pascal�s writings and the Jansenistic theology she embraces. For some years they are separated and communicate by mail, seeing each other very seldom, but when they are together it always appears, at least to Jerome, that they will one day marry. Alissa knows this will not happen, but doesn�t quite know how to deal with the conflict of her profound love of Jerome which she denies herself and him. Eventually at the young age of 25 Alissa dies. Jerome is both devastated by her death and totally unable to understand what went wrong with their relationship. Shortly after her death Juliette sends Jerome Alissa�s journals and he reads them learning, for the first time, this strange religious view that she had, and how that was the driving force in their relationship. He is devastated, but at least he comes to understand. He realizes how fully she embraced the position that she took from Pascal. �What is not God cannot satisfy my longing.� He also learns that she had to curb her deep passion for him in order for her to reach her God. However, I don�t think he ever fully understands that he was madly in love more with his IMAGE of Alissa that Alissa herself. On the other hand, he was at the great disadvantage that she so carefully hid from him her real self. This is a deeply tragic and sad novel, and very beautifully written. I come away not exactly sure what to make of it. Is it a commentary that says even in a situation where two people deeply love each other, that neither those of us on the outside, nor even the lovers themselves can fully understand such a relationship? Or is it a criticism of a religious view that allows one to complete deceive one�s lover in the name of a higher love of God? It�s just not clear to me what to make of this sad, sad story. Strait is the Gate. Gide has a rare talent for spotting important moral issues, particularly relevant to his own time, and then presenting them in a scrupulously fair manner. The Immoralist can be read as a defense of . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. This is a truly exasperating story of a man's love for a woman and how the insanity of religion destroys it. If you need proof that religion is a mental illness, look no further than the painful story . Читать весь отзыв. Избранные страницы. Содержание. Другие издания - Просмотреть все. Часто встречающиеся слова и выражения. Об авторе (2007) Gide, the reflective rebel against bourgeois morality and one of the most important and controversial figures in modern European literature, published his first book anonymously at the age of 18. Gide was born in Paris, the only child of a law professor and a strict Calvinist mother. As a young man, he was an ardent member of the symbolist group, but the style of his later work is more in the tradition of classicism. Much of his work is autobiographical, and the story of his youth and early adult years and the discovery of his own sexual tendencies is related in Si le grain ne meurt (If it die . . .) (1926). Corydon (1923) deals with the question of homosexuality openly. Gide's reflections on life and literature are contained in his Journals (1954), which span the years 1889--1949. He was a founder of the influential Nouvelle Revue Francaise, in which the works of many prominent modern European authors appeared, and he remained a director until 1941. He resigned when the journal passed into the hands of the collaborationists. Gide's sympathies with communism prompted him to travel to Russia, where he found the realities of Soviet life less attractive than he had imagined. His accounts of his disillusionment were published as Return from the U.S.S.R. (1937) and Afterthoughts from the U.S.S.R. (1938). Always preoccupied with freedom, a champion of the oppressed and a skeptic, he remained an incredibly youthful spirit. Gide himself classified his fiction into three categories: satirical tales with elements of farce like Les Caves du Vatican (Lafcadio's Adventures) (1914), which he termed soties; ironic stories narrated in the first person like The Immoralist (1902) and Strait Is the Gate (1909), which he called recits; and a more complex narrative related from a multifaceted point of view, which he called a roman (novel). The only example of the last category that he published was The Counterfeiters (1926). Throughout his career, Gide maintained an extensive correspondence with such noted figures as Valery, Claudel, Rilke, and others. In 1947, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Andrew Moore assisted James McNair on the last 10 of his cookbooks, including recipe development and editing. James and Andrew divide their time between a home in Northern California and their lodge on the north shore of Lake Tahoe. STRAIT IS THE GATE (La Porte étroite) by André Gide, 1909. In The Immoralist ( L'Immoraliste ) André Gide had tentatively explored the moral consequences of a particular type of self-centered and, by innuendo, atheistic hedonism. By implication Gide's text had rejected it. Strait Is the Gate ( La Porte étroite ) explores and rejects the opposite possibility—that the summit of human achievement lies in the renunciation of all earthly joys. It is the story of Jerome, told 13 years later, and of his love as a young adolescent for his cousin Alissa, who turns him down, wastes away, and finally dies. The ambiguities are carefully built up. Gide uses a narrator speaking directly in the first person. His feelings are too involved in the narration for his judgments to be accepted without reflection, however, even now that he is no longer young. Alissa's point of view is presented in letters and in the substantial section of her diary copied verbatim by Jerome and inserted into the narrative after he has given his own version of what happened. There is an abundance of allusions contemporary readers might miss; the writing is too self-consciously artistic to be taken entirely at face value. There is ample evidence in the text to show that, as Gide later said, there is something "forced and excessive" in Alissa's view. But the element of falsification is quite subtly insinuated, for instance, in Alissa's implied but consciously literary self-identification with Pascal in her diary entries. As if aware that he may have been overly allusive, however, Gide makes the distortion of authentic spiritual values more straightforwardly obvious in the "depoetization" Alissa undergoes in pursuit of her ascetic endeavors. She gets rid of her literary books and her piano. Against a background of delicately portrayed adolescent love, as seen by one of the participants 10 years after the death of the other, Gide uses an extraordinary miasma of halftones. The reader is expected to pick up tiny adolescent pomposities, slight excesses in literary allusiveness, covert allusions to Claudel's texts, and references to Goethe's concept of "elective affinities," or spiritual relationships, trivial behavioral spontaneities betraying in painful surface emotions the vulnerably raw reactions of adolescence. Alissa is incapable of enduring any physical contact with Jerome, and yet when, three years after their last meeting, Jerome is by chance again at Le Havre and has indulged his nostalgia sufficiently to go to the country house where Alissa lives and where he had so often stayed, he finds that she knew he was coming; for three days she had been coming down to the garden gate to meet him. This was the gate that together they had previously used, but the gate was also the symbolic barrier between them, the multiva-lent gate of the title. The reader is expected to pick up the almost exquisitely subtle inadequacy of the reasons for exaggerated shame and self-deceiving selflessness that make Alissa unwilling to marry Jerome and drive her to neglect her mind, her aesthetic pleasures, her taste, her music, her appearance, and finally her health, so as to protect some analogue within her of emotional anorexia. Gide leaves Alissa's incapacity for shared intimacy ambiguous almost to the end, when Jerome reproduces the diary extracts. Indeed, Alissa's spiritual power remains such that the ambiguity extends beyond her death. One of the reasons she had alleged for not marrying Jerome was that her sister, Juliette, loved him. Juliette's daughter is called Alissa and looks like Juliette's sister. It is a family resemblance with her mother's sister no doubt, but Gide delights in leaving the reader to wonder. The infant also looks like the woman loved by the man her mother really loved, not her husband, the father. Gide's characters are sufficiently sheltered from economic problems for the fiction to concentrate on their spiritual anguishes. Strait Is the Gate is set against a background of a large French family in which uncles and aunts take turns holding reunions on great estates during the holidays. Gide rightly thought in 1910 that it was the best piece he had yet written, although he was taken aback at the way his Catholic friends wrongly welcomed the book as a sign of imminent conversion. The narrative opens just after Jerome, aged 12, has lost his father. His mother had moved to Paris from Le Havre, and the background to most of the story is the estate at Fongueusemare where Jerome's Creole aunt, his father's sister, lives with her children, Alissa, Juliette, and Robert. Jerome devotes several pages to his aunt, and three successive paragraphs begin with her name. She wore bright colors and low-cut dresses, rose at midday, spent her time in an apparent dream, and had a way of lingering on the chords when she played Chopin's mazurkas. Jerome feels strange one day when she undoes one of the buttons of his sailor's shirt. At this point in the story he breaks off to address the reader—"It's time I told you about my cousin"—and Gide makes his syntax falter to betray his emotion. The first major incident occurred when Jerome was 14 years old and, unexpectedly free for the afternoon, he called on Alissa. He passed his aunt's room, where his aunt was lounging, making jokes at his uncle's expense, and sharing a cigarette with a lieutenant in the presence of Juliette and Robert. He finds Alissa in her room, on her knees, crying. Alissa is clearly concerned that her father should not know what went on, and the reader realizes only slowly that Alissa comes to use the shame she feels at her mother's behavior as an excuse for her own frigidity. The whole of the story's interest lies the ambiguity of Alissa's behavior and the delicate depiction of her growing self-deceit. There are subtle ironies, as when Alissa dreams that Jerome has died and she has to make a huge effort to find him. In fact she does make the effort, but she is the one who dies. An amethyst cross becomes a symbol of their union. There is a brilliant set piece as the older children and young adults perform the rite of decorating the Christmas tree and Juliette tells Jerome that Alissa wants her to marry before Alissa herself does. Alissa has no more reason not to marry Jerome on Juliette's account than she has on account of exaggerated shame at her mother's behavior. The récit is the story of her unfolding self-deception as she forces herself self-destructively through the narrow gate of an immature asceticism. The story, apparently guileless, is a highly sophisticated literary artifact scintillating with resonances, a strong candidate for the most brilliantly written short fiction to have appeared in France in the twentieth century. Reading the World: ‘The Immoralist’ by Andre Gide ***** I adored Strait is the Gate , the first work of Gide’s which I read, and was eager to carry on with his books. When I spotted a neat copy of The Immoralist in Books for Amnesty whilst on a shopping trip in Cambridge then, I simply could not resist picking it up. Seamlessly translated from its original French by David Watson in 2000, and introduced by Alan Sheridan, the novella was first published in France in 1902. The Immoralist takes as its focal point a newly married couple, Michel and Marceline, and is set during the 1890s. They travel to Tunisia for their honeymoon, where Michel becomes gravely ill with tuberculosis, and learns something fundamental about himself: ‘During his recovery, he meets a young Arab boy, whose radiant health and beauty captivate him. This is an awakening for him both sexually and morally and, in seeking to live according to his own desires, Michel discovers a new freedom. But, as he also finds, freedom can be a burden.’ In this ‘awakening’, The Immoralist feels rather ahead of its time; it is never entirely explicit, but the passion and adoration – almost hero-worship – which Michel feels for the young boy has been tenderly presented. One can find indications throughout about Michel’s homosexual tendencies; for instance, whilst in Naples, he went ‘prowling’. Of Marceline, Sheridan writes that Michel sees her ‘as no more than a companion’, although at times one comes to believe that he loves her in his own, albeit platonic, manner; he describes her at the end of the second chapter, for instance, as ‘my wife, my life…’. The novella – for it runs to just 124 pages – begins with a letter written by an unnamed friend of Michel’s; he and two other friends, who have all been close since their schooldays, travel to Michel after receiving a cry for help: ‘we dropped everything and set off together’. The story which follows is as it was told to the group of friends, using Michel’s own voice. This monologue is a simple yet effective plot device, and an awful lot is learnt about our protagonist and his decisions in consequence. His voice is both engaging and believable, and his character fully-formed. He is touchingly, and occasionally brutally, honest: ‘I may not love my fiancee, I told myself, but at least I have never loved another woman. In my view that was enough to ensure our happiness.’ As far as Marceline is concerned, she is rather an exemplary figure; kind and patient, her main priority throughout is Michel, even at those times in which he does not treat her very well, or consider her feelings. Life and mortality, as well as the overriding issue of morality, are major themes within The Immoralist . In the first period of his recovery, Michel realises quite how astonishing life is: ‘I am still very weak, my breathing is laboured, everything tires me out, even reading. But what would I read? Simply existing is enough for me.’ The Immoralist has been both beautifully written and translated. Indeed, Watson’s translation has such a fluidity to it that it seems almost a surprise that English was not simply its original language. I was utterly absorbed throughout my reading of The Immoralist ; it is a sensual novel, and it certainly holds something which feels fresh, even to the modern eye. Gide’s descriptions are decadent, both striking and vivid, and they often have a quiet power to them: ‘The regularly spaced palm trees, drained of their colour and life, looked as if they would never stir again… But in sleep there is still the beat of life. Here nothing seemed to be sleeping, everything seemed dead’. There is rather an enlightening quote which we can take from Sheridan’s introduction: ‘If Michel is an “immoralist” it is not because he finally succumbs to “immorality”: his sexual activities are incidental to the novel’s main concerns. Michel is an “immoralist” because he has adopted Nietzsche’s view that morality is a weapon of the weak, of a slave mentality’. Indeed, there are many rather profound ideas which are woven into the text, or which spring up whilst reading and can be considered afterwards. In his own preface, Gide writes: ‘If I had intended to set my hero up as an exemplary figure, I admit that I would have failed. Those few people who bothered to take an interest in Michel’s story did so only to revile him with the force of their rectitude. Giving Marceline so many virtues was not a waste of time: Michel was not forgiven for putting himself before her.’ To see Michel’s end, of course, one needs to read this fantastic and startling novella for themselves; this reviewer shall give nothing further away. Suffice it to say that perceptive and startling, with a powerful denouement, and a fascinating portrayal of rather an unconventional relationship, I enjoyed The Immoralist just as much as Strait as the Gate . Reading the World: ‘Strait is the Gate’ by Andre Gide ***** Strait is the Gate is, for some reason, the first of Andre Gide’s books which I have read, despite his having been on my radar for years. I had written his name upon the list of authors whom I hoped to get to during 2017, and also thought that he would be a great inclusion upon my Reading the World list. First published in France in 1909, and in Dorothy Bussy’s 1924 translation, I could not pass up the chance of adding yet another marvellous classic of French literature to my list. Strait is the Gate also seemed a wonderful place to start, being, as it is, the first novel by the Nobel Prize for Literature winner of 1947, and one of his best works in English; indeed, its blurb states that is is ‘… regarded by many as the most perfect piece of writing which Gide ever achieved. In its simplicity, its craftsmanship, its limpidity of style, and its power to stimulate the mind and the emotions at one and the same time, it set a standard for the short novel which has not yet been excelled’. Strait is the Gate is a ‘story of young love blighted and turned to tragedy by the sense of religious dedication in the beloved’. The novella’s opening paragraph is relayed in one of my favourite styles: ‘Some people might have made a book out of it; but the story I am going to tell is one which took all my strength to live and over which I spent all my virtue. So I shall set down my recollections quite simply, and if in places they are ragged I shall have recourse to no invention, and neither patch nor connect them; any effort I might make to dress them up would take away the last pleasure I hope to gt in telling them’. All of Gide’s writing holds this strength, and his descriptions in particular are absolutely beautiful, and often quite startling. Of the house of an uncle, our narrator, Jerome, says thus: ‘Certain others [windows] have flaws in the glass which our parents used to call “bubbles”; a tree seen through them becomes distorted; when the postman passes he suddenly develops a hump’. He describes his aunt, Lucile, whilst she is playing the piano: ‘… sometimes she would break off in the middle of a bar and pause, suspended motionless on a chord’. After the death of both of his parents, young Jerome becomes infatuated with his cousin, Alissa, with whom he spends every summer at her family’s secluded house in Le Havre. ‘No doubt,’ he says, ‘like all boys of fourteen, I was still unformed and pliable, but my love for Alissa soon urged me further and more deliberately along the road on which I had started’. Alissa’s younger sister, Juliette, fast becomes a go-between for the pair: ‘She was the messenger… I talked to her interminably of our love, and she never seemed tired of listening. I told her what I dared not tell Alissa, with whom excess of love made me constrained and shy. Alissa seemed to lend herself to this child’s play and to be delighted that I should talk so happily to her sister, ignoring or feigning to ignore that in reality we talked only of her’. Religion was not so much of an aspect here as the blurb makes out; rather, it is more of a familial novel, and a wonderfully wrought one at that. Interesting family politics are at play throughout. Letters which Gide writes from the perspective of others in Jerome’s family feel entirely authentic; he has captured such nuanced elements of voice, and renders each distinctive. His prose is packed with emotion, which grows as the work progresses. Bussy’s translation is seamless; there is such a marvellous elasticity to the writing, and the whole has been rendered beautifully. Strait is the Gate is a truly beautiful work, and a novella which I was immediately immersed within. Whilst it is my first taste of Gide’s work, it certainly will not be my last. I can fast see him becoming one of my favourite authors, in fact. Strait is the Gate.

Strait is the Gate ( 狭き門, , Sekimon ? ) [1] is the ability of André Gide. Contents. Description. Strait is the Gate allows Gide to foresee in his mind five to six seconds into the future, similar to the ability of Sakunosuke Oda. This ability that could predict the enemy's attack also let Gide and his subordinates to appear and disappear from one location to another almost like "specters". To note, Ango Sakaguchi once mentioned that even the Special Division for Unusual Powers had some difficulty tracking them to the point that even the only method to handle them – dropping a bomb on them – would still be highly ineffective against Gide and his predictive ability. Oda and Gide in a singularity. One unique instance Gide experienced in relation to using his ability was when he first Oda due to their identical abilities, causing their abilities to counteract each other. For example, during their first skirmish, Gide continually utilized his ability to predict Oda's shots and to adjust his aims towards Oda and even his immediate dodges accordingly. Eventually, a resulting singularity emerged between their two abilities, where time went on indefinitely and the two continued to see what the other saw one step ahead of the other. Moreover, not a single second had passed by in the singularity sphere, and the singularity lasted until their deaths. [2] Appearances. Dark Era Arc. Episode 15 - A Room Where We Can Someday See the Ocean Episode 16 - Bungo Stray Dogs. Derivation. The ability is based on Strait is the Gate ( La Porte Étroite ), a 1909 novel written by the real-life André Gide. It is written in epistolary format chronicled and narrated by the protagonist Jerome and his beloved named Alissa. In essence, the novel probes the complexities of adolescence and growing up, anchored on various influences from childhood experience and misunderstandings between two people based on Freudian interpretation. [3] Strait is the Gate by André Gide. From and To can't be the same language. That page is already in . Something went wrong. Check the webpage URL and try again. Sorry, that page did not respond in a timely manner. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Something went wrong, please try again. Try using the Translator for the Microsoft Edge extension instead. Strait is the Gate by André Gide. Introduced to the writing of André Gide by an early mentor, Simone de Beauvoir feasted on everything he wrote. This early Gide story takes its title from the King James bible, “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Thrown by the blurb on the back cover of my Penguin Classics edition, which reads, “A devastating exploration of aestheticism taken to extremes,” I was half way through before I realised the typo: for ‘aestheticism,’ read ‘asceticism’. Though there are nods toward modernism, Strait is the Gate is fundamentally a Romantic story of doomed love. Gide writes exquisitely; the suppressed agonising of the three primary characters, Jerome, Alissa and Juliette is visceral in its despair; the final chapter is almost unendurable. Written in the first-person, Gide uses letters and a diary to present contrasting perspectives. During an uneasy walk after a long absence, Jerome narrates: My head was aching so badly that I could not extract a single idea from it; to keep myself in countenance, or because I thought that the gesture might serve instead of words, I had taken Alissa’s hand, which she let me keep. Our emotion, the rapidity of our walk, and the awkwardness of our silence, sent the blood to our faces; I felt my temples throbbing; Alissa’s colour was unpleasantly heightened; and soon the discomfort of feeling the contact of our damp hands made us unclasp them and let them drop sadly to our sides. Days later, when the couple have again parted, Alissa writes: But when our lugubrious expedition to Orcher came to an end without a word, when, above all, our hands unclasped and fell apart so hopelessly, I thought my heart would have fainted within me for grief and pain. And what distressed me most was not so much that your hand let go of mine, but my feeling that if yours had not, mine would have done so, for my hand no longer felt happy in yours. Alissa adds a postscript to this letter with the phrase, “[…] your love was above all intellectual, the beautiful tenacity of a tender and faithful mind.” I am much taken with the concept of an ‘intellectual love,’ so devastatingly accurate; I write it in my notebook and repeat it throughout the day. Like this: 5 thoughts on “ Strait is the Gate by André Gide ” >I love the way in which you follow the reading trails you discover from one author to the next. I do that too, but more gradually, with the result that often the original trail has gone cold by the time I actually get around to reading the books that a long-ago book inspired me to add to my list. Gide and Alain-Fournier, for example, were added to the list by Beauvoir, but have yet to make it into my hands. Still, the phrase "beautiful tenacity of a tender and faithful mind" goes a long way toward moving Gide up the queue. >That last quote is truly amazing. I might have to stop reading your blog, your making my reading list too long! >I've never been great at delaying gratification, Emily. It is why I am unable to stick to a reading plan.It is a very beautiful book. >Gide's exquisite prose must have been a challenge for the translator, Fiona. This edition was translated by Dorothy Bussy, who was a sister of Lytton Strachey, and one heck of a character in her own right. Strait Is the Gate by André Gide (2007, Perfect) С самой низкой ценой, совершенно новый, неиспользованный, неоткрытый, неповрежденный товар в оригинальной упаковке (если товар поставляется в упаковке). Упаковка должна быть такой же, как упаковка этого товара в розничных магазинах, за исключением тех случаев, когда товар является изделием ручной работы или был упакован производителем в упаковку не для розничной продажи, например в коробку без маркировки или в пластиковый пакет. См. подробные сведения с дополнительным описанием товара. Strait is the Gate by Andre Gide. About this Item: Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1971. Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Reprint; Second Printing. Light reading and some cover creases. ; Nice tight copy, no names or marks inside. Cover artwork detail from The Reader by Henri Matisse. Translated from the original French by Dorothy Bussey. ; Penguin Modern Classics; 128 pages; The story of a young love blighted and turned to tragedy. Mass Market PB. Seller Inventory # 22962. Strait Is The Gate. GIDE, Andre. Published by U.K / Penguin Books (1952) Quantity available: 1. From: Bookenastics (Liverpool, United Kingdom) About this Item: U.K / Penguin Books, 1952. Soft cover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. It probes the complexities and terrors of adolescence and growing up. Based on a Freudian interpretation, the story uses the influences of childhood experience and the misunderstandings that can arise between two people. Translated from the French (La porte �troite) by Dorothy Bussy. / This is a 1st edition paperback in good condition-cover a little creased & rubbed. (143 pages & 15 pages of introduction). Seller Inventory # 9170.