Anatole France - Book review

by Songül Arslan

Always on the lookout for interesting novelists, I received the advice to read something of Anatole France because his books were anything but average.

As I studied a little of this man's history, I learned something of his life. A novelist with the last name "France" can only hail from one country: France, of course. Born in Paris in 1844, Jacques Anatole Francois Thibaut grew up in his father's bookshop called "Librarie de France." All the time spent in the bookshop inspired his pseudonym of Anatole France.

Anatole France received a classical education and had many jobs to pay to the bills before he became a successful author. He was an assistant to his father in the bookshop, a cataloguer, a publisher's assistant and a teacher, among other things before he had success in the literary world. As a writer, he started out as a poet and published his collections of poems, "Les poems Dores," in 1875.

He later tried writing novels and finally had a breakthrough with "The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard" in 1881. The title character is an old scholar who lives peacefully on his own with an older house maid who takes care of the mundane chores of cooking and cleaning. It is said that France put much of himself into creating the character of Bonnard, a very agreeable sketch of a person.

Sylvestre Bonnard is happy and satisfied as he is, living amongst his bookshelves and reading every day. Then things start to change. He gets acquainted with a young girl living in a boarding school and she offers a life outside of his books. Because she has no money and no guardian, she is treated worse than the other girls. Somehow she manages makes an impression on this reclusive elderly man and he begins to feel responsible for her.

Because of his new found understanding of life Bonnard commits a crime. I, like most readers, don't see it as a crime at all, but in the strict sense of the law it is. Actually there is a minimal plot in the novel, but France forces his readers to think and the words of Sylvestre Bonnard ring out, as if he were really speaking to you face-to-face. From this point of view I think my advisor was right--France's is not an ordinary voice.

This talent of France earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1921, around the same time that the Roman Catholic Church put his writings on the index of Forbidden Books.

His "The Gods are Athirst" (1912), also called "A Novel of the Terror of 1793", is the novel that I have enjoyed the most of all his works. France undoubtedly spent many hours studying in his father's bookshop and verifying many historical facts about the French Revolution before he set pen to paper.

The main character, Evariste Gamelin, starts as an idealistic, honourable and just person devoted to the Republic but turns into a dangerous fanatic. He becomes a person completely unconscious of the effects of his actions and ideas and even when he wins the love of Elodie, a young woman whom he had longed for for quite some time, he does not change for the better. In the end he becomes a caricature of himself. His transformation would have been funny were it not for the fact that he decides to vote for the death of his neighbour and his brother-in-law. The pleas of his sister and his mother have no effect on him or his stubborn mind. I felt the message France conveyed with this novel was that stubbornness and arrogance of mind makes a person sign his own death warrant.

Anatole France has written many more books, including "Penguin Island," which I just started reading, and each has its own originality and voice making it unique in the literary world. The books of Anatole France are a great find, especially for readers who are looking for something a little out of the ordinary.