Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier, 1913)

This one is well-known in France but not so much elsewhere. In England, perhaps. It’s about a teenager who moves to a new town and then finds a magical garden in which he falls in love and then tries to find that garden and the girl he fell in love with again. Sounds formulaic? Maybe it is. But it is also a nice novel about youth and love and their inevitable complications (partly inspired by the author’s own life). It is written just before the first great war, so it stands as one of the last novels of the pre-ww1 era, and its sensibilities reflect that time period. Part romantic and part modernist it is a mixture of influences. It is also a late example of the rural novel, as it is set in the rural area of Cher in the middle of the French hexagon, where Alain-Fournier himself grew up. The romanticizing of childhood made me think of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which was written around the same time.
The titular character Augustin Meaulnes is the main protagonist but the story is narrated by the younger Francois. This is a modernist angle. The title le Grand Meaulnes is said to have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to write his Great Gatsby. The book accumulated more mystique as its author saw his demise shortly after the book was published, as he was deployed and killed while serving as lieutenant in the French army in September 1914.