The Immoralist is still disturbingly fascinating even after
more than a hundred years since its publication. It remains (obviously) a very
quick read, but it’s sufficiently disquieting to leave a mark on the reader.
I read it right after reading Lolita,
and I am not quite sure whether I was more disturbed by this novel than by
Nabokov’s one because the sources of Michel’s interest are even younger than
Humber’s nymphets, or whether it was more shocking because it was set in a more
distant past, and some of its key pages set in a more distant culture (with all
the patronizing aspects of colonialism, by the way).
Despite having read the book now more than a year ago, I am still unsure
of my opinion of Michel: on the one hand, I kind of want his happiness and want
him to be able to find a place in society for what he really is (and not for
what he has to pretend to be), on the other hand I have the feeling that – no matter
how open-minded I consider myself to be – I would still be a member of that
society that would actually condemn Michel’s true personality.
And I very much wonder why I liked this novel and just got bored of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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