Atala and Rene

Atala and Rene by Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, 96 pages

This book collects two famous short stories by Chateaubriand.  Atala is a tale told to the young Frenchman Rene by the elderly Natchez Chactas, relating how as a young man he was captured by the Muscogees and condemned to death by torture, but was saved by the love of the virtuous maiden Atala.  Rene is told by Rene to Chactas, explaining why he left behind the sister he loved to find a new home in the American wilderness.

Together, these two stories established Chateaubriand's reputation as France's answer to Goethe, but just as The Sorrows of Young Werther seems cliche after two centuries, so too Atala and, to a lesser extent, Rene.  Unlike Young Werther, however, Chateaubriand's stories appeal to a timeless standard to judge their protagonists.

Evangeline

Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 81 pages

     Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient,

     Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of women's devotion,

     List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest;

     List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.

In the middle of the 18th century, the vast majority of the 14000 French inhabitants of Acadia were forcibly deported by the British government, scattered across North America and Europe.  Visitors to present day Nova Scotia, the Acadia that was, will find a statue of Evangeline, a person who never existed outside of poetry.  Statues of the same fictional character can be found in Louisiana, where many of the exiles settled and formed new communities as "Acadian" gradually developed into "Cajun".  In both cases, Evangeline, separated from her lover as well as her home, stands as a representative of all that the Acadians loved and lost.

Of course, Longfellow was a poet, not a historian, and his genius makes universals out of particulars.  This is embodied within the poem by a Shawnee widow whose own tragic tale mirrors Evangeline's, and who shares with the heroine legends in which similar stories are told and retold, as hers has continued to be since 1847.

Troilus and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer, from The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, translated by John SP Tatlock and Percy MacKaye, 137 pages

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is a tragic tale of lovers during wartime.  A Trojan knight, Troilus, is punished for his mockery of love by being smitten with the Criseyde, a Trojan widow whose father has defected to the Greeks.  Even as Troilus gains the assistance of Criseyde's uncle Pandarus to win his lady's love, other forces conspire to tear them apart.

The "Modern Reader's Chaucer" was translated into something approximating modern English prose, with a King James accent to give it an antique feel.  Chaucer's anachronisms have the peculiar charm of a painting of Biblical figures in Renaissance dress, or an Elizabethan play in modern dress.  While this eviscerates the poetry of the piece, it does preserve the distancing effect necessary for a "modern reader" to accept some of the story's more dated conceits.  This clears the way for a deeply moving experience, albeit not quite the one Chaucer intended.

The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, 318 pages

I originally read The Fault in Our Stars in 2012, shortly after it was published. I’ve read most of Green’s body of work, and I fall pretty solidly in the John-Green-Fan column. In fact, in my personal experience he seems to be read more frequently by adults than teens. (My experience is totally anecdotal and is based on observing who checked out John Green books while I worked at a circulation desk; I never kept an official teen vs. adult tally or any other scientific statistics). It seems undeniable that he’s one of those cross-over YA author who appeals strongly to adult readers as well as teens. Even the way The Fault in Our Stars’s book jacket is designed seems meant to appeal to adult readers as much (or more so) than teenagers. The cover doesn’t have any of the common YA cover tropes (e.g. big face, girl in a fancy dress, cropped out head, etc.) and the cover blurb is by Jodi Picoult, an adult author. It’s a book that an adult wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen carrying around (have you seen some of the YA covers out there? Cassandra Clare, I’m looking at you).

I wasn’t exactly looking forward to rereading The Fault in Our Stars because I remembered vividly how heart wrenching the story was. It is, after all, a Romeo and Juliette tale about teens who have cancer. I made it to just over page 100 before tearing up for the first time (Hazel waking up in the ICU did me in). By the end of the book I was, once again, an emotional wreck (even though I knew exactly what was coming). Overall, I’m happy with how well The Fault in Our Stars held up under a second reading, it still packs an emotional wallop.

I don’t know many people who are as well-spoken and articulate as the teens in John Green novels (I wish I were half as articulate as a John Green teen). Personally, I do tend to enjoy that snappy Gilmore Girls/Juno/Woody Allen style dialogue, but I do understand how it might not sit well with other readers. I did like Green’s presentation of the (markedly less-articulate) parents in the book. Unlike in many other YA novels, they weren’t absent, they weren’t stupid, they weren’t abusive or evil or cruel; they were fairly realistic suburban middle-class parents. (I don’t mean to imply that abusive, absent parents don’t exist, but sometimes I feel like they are the ONLY type of parents that exist in YA novels). Though the book is focused on Hazel and Gus, Green gives us enough of a glimpse into the parental characters to show that they DO have lives outside of their children, which as Hazel points out, is quite a difficult feat since taking care of a kid with cancer is a full time job. I don’t hesitate to recommend The Fault in Our Stars to adult and teen readers alike.