- Paperback: 128 pages
- Publisher: Pushkin Press (27 Feb 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1901285286
- ISBN-13: 978-1901285284
- Product Dimensions: 16.3 x 12.2 x 1.3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,114,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Review
Green offers an elliptical coming-out tale ... elegant and hugely atmospheric. --SIMON LOVAT Gay Times
The Other Sleep was, said Green, an act of self-deception; but in deceiving himself he produced something visionary and timeless ... this is rather more than a fictional exercise, it is a brave and extraordinarily honest account of the of the adolescence of Julian Green himself ... more than interesting, a true work of art. --NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
The Other Sleep is written with humour and a poet's lightness of touch... This is a book about pleasure itself, and the misery it can bring with its joy ... I found it inspired personal recollection; it is like entering the mind-set of a teenage boy. --QX International
The Other Sleep was, said Green, an act of self-deception; but in deceiving himself he produced something visionary and timeless ... this is rather more than a fictional exercise, it is a brave and extraordinarily honest account of the of the adolescence of Julian Green himself ... more than interesting, a true work of art. --NICHOLAS LEZARD The Guardian
The Other Sleep is written with humour and a poet's lightness of touch... This is a book about pleasure itself, and the misery it can bring with its joy ... I found it inspired personal recollection; it is like entering the mind-set of a teenage boy. --QX International
Product Description
'Standing on the bridge, in the heart of Paris, a little boy is afraid; his cousin Claude is holding him by the ankles above the murky waters of the Seine'. This startling opening paragraph will become a backdrop to his subsequent memories as a young man of a childhood marked by sadness. Within him, a struggle is taking place between the sheer wild joy of being alive and the despondency of existence. And it is in Paris, a Paris exquisitely etched, that his unspoken passion for Claude gradually unfolds.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
Published in 1931, Julien Green, an American born in Paris wrote this short novel in French. The narrator Denis is reminiscing on his life which opens when he is an 8 year old boy: an only child living in Paris with his parents and his 13 year old orphaned cousin Claude. Denis's childhood is marked by several sad events: his father's suicide, Claude leaving the household when aged circa 17 to join the army and never coming to visit or write and his confused and indifferent relationship with the young pretty Andree. In 1971 Green states in his afterword that this story is "a farewell to childhood" and the gradual awakening of sexual identity. This culminates when at the time he is about to sit his final baccalaureate exams his mother dies. At the funeral Denis meets Claude again and feelings are reawakened. The account of the sleeping Claude in a field outside Paris is intensely evocative and memorable. The Other Sleep is a lyrical and dreamy reminiscence of a young boy's painfully slow coming of age.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
Early coming of age novel set in Paris
7 July 2011
Format:Paperback
Published in 1931, Julien Green, an American born in Paris wrote this short novel in French. The narrator Denis is reminiscing on his life which opens when he is an 8 year old boy: an only child living in Paris with his parents and his 13 year old orphaned cousin Claude. Denis's childhood is marked by several sad events: his father's suicide, Claude leaving the household when aged circa 17 to join the army and never coming to visit or write and his confused and indifferent relationship with the young pretty Andree. AIn 1971 Green states in his afterword that this story "is a farewell to childhood" and the gradual awakening of sexual identity. This culminates when at the time he is about to sit his final baccalaureate exams his mother dies. At the funeral Denis meets Claude again and feelings are reawakened. The account of the sleeping Claude in a field outside Paris is intensely evocative and memorable. The Other Sleep is a lyrical and dreamy reminiscence of a young boy's painfully slow coming of age.
The 1931 novelette that crowns Julian Green's early career
21 Mar 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Pascal contemplated that one's waking hours may be but "another sleep," and one's dreaming hours may indeed be another existence, of equal weight. Julian Green contemplated that as he "created" afresh the reality of the present book his imagination was amalgamating events from his past existence: he was not thinking, but dreaming.
The book is little because it effortlessly, miraculously conveys the essence of the author's self: his isolation from people acquiescing to ordinariness and impurity, his yearning to speak "I love you" to a beautiful male face and to be answered in kind, the two bonding in a perfection beyond carnality.
THE STORY
Say around 1908, Denis is the only child of a middle-class family in Paris, but his hardened orphaned cousin Claude, several years older, has been taken in. A poor student, an immovable resister, Claude is like an older brother, an indifferent companion--yet he casts an inexplicable spell over Denis.
Denis may gaze long at the sleeping Claude. Denis may gaze long at the naked Greek statues in the plaster-casting shop. Denis is lured by his lycee associate Remy to meet girlfriend Andree, deeply troubled because she has yielded to Remy. Denis loses his father, the First World War breaks out, Claude enlists, Denis loses his mother. Mustered out, Claude stolidly attends her funeral. A few days afterward, Denis seeks out Claude in his hotel room, to join him in the short journey to the site of their summer vacations, and there among the well-remembered trees, to say "I love you."
Though the novelette is told in the first person, Julian Green denied that it was really autobiographical. For Denis's relation to father and mother is ultimately unfeeling, and Claude is a recasting of Mark, Julian's perfectly loved beautiful face at the University of Virginia in the early 1920s--a face whose eyes could never express to Julian, I love you.
The book is little because it effortlessly, miraculously conveys the essence of the author's self: his isolation from people acquiescing to ordinariness and impurity, his yearning to speak "I love you" to a beautiful male face and to be answered in kind, the two bonding in a perfection beyond carnality.
THE STORY
Say around 1908, Denis is the only child of a middle-class family in Paris, but his hardened orphaned cousin Claude, several years older, has been taken in. A poor student, an immovable resister, Claude is like an older brother, an indifferent companion--yet he casts an inexplicable spell over Denis.
Denis may gaze long at the sleeping Claude. Denis may gaze long at the naked Greek statues in the plaster-casting shop. Denis is lured by his lycee associate Remy to meet girlfriend Andree, deeply troubled because she has yielded to Remy. Denis loses his father, the First World War breaks out, Claude enlists, Denis loses his mother. Mustered out, Claude stolidly attends her funeral. A few days afterward, Denis seeks out Claude in his hotel room, to join him in the short journey to the site of their summer vacations, and there among the well-remembered trees, to say "I love you."
Though the novelette is told in the first person, Julian Green denied that it was really autobiographical. For Denis's relation to father and mother is ultimately unfeeling, and Claude is a recasting of Mark, Julian's perfectly loved beautiful face at the University of Virginia in the early 1920s--a face whose eyes could never express to Julian, I love you.
5 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Landmark of Gay literature
25 Sep 2002
Format:Paperback
Julian Green's 1931 novella about a young man who comes to awareness of same-sex desire is a landmark of Gay literature, long out of print. Still, readers who encounter _The Other Sleep_ may find that this voice from the past eerily resembles that of the contemporary Gay writer Edmund White. (I suspect that Green, not Proust, is White's true literary forebear.) Half a century before the classic coming-out novel _A Boy's Own Story_, Green explored very similar emotional territory, and did it at least as well as White.
That said, Euan Cameron's translation is much too mannered and precious for my taste. Green has generally been ill served by his translators (which is why, outside of France, he has never been as widely read as he should be), and Cameron is no better or worse than the rest of the lot.
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