André Gide, Marshlands
NYRB Classics, 2021
An unnamed narrator is writing a book called Marshlands—his friends all think it’s boring, his girlfriend wishes he’d commit, he has literary parties to go to and he says he hates literary parties… It is not 2010s Brooklyn, it is 1890s Paris. Nobel Prize winner André Gide’s most timeless novel, a pioneering work of autofiction/metafiction, is a truly hilarious look at the pretentiousness, but also real emotional stakes, of the writer’s life.
There’s something compelling in Gide’s perception that all of us are trapped, regardless of the pandemic, in some kind of lifelong lockdown, the days essentially featureless, relieved only by trivialities like our meaningless work, our predictable cultural products and our irrelevant public affairs.
— Ken Kalfus, The New York Times Book Review
In the lightest, most Parisian way [Marshlands] foreshadows the 20th-century preoccupation with intertextuality, books-within-books, perilously shifting levels of reality and the blurring between genres.
— Edmund White, London Review of Books
First published in 1895, Marshlands is an antic anti-novella about writing, friendship, envy, and ambition that is as crisply funny as anything written since. — Ed Park, “Best Books of the Year,” Bookforum
I don’t understand a single thing in Marshlands. Did I write the book?
— André Gide