3.5 ☆ A coming of age story about best pals Gene + Finney, two boys that live at a New Hampshire boys boarding school during WWll, both overachiever’s.. one in athletics, the other book smart.
An accident happens to Finney caused by Gene’s extreme jealousy over him resulting in a broken leg. The truth later gets revealed, and in those final moments takes a life. A great story about friendship + regret.

A Separate Peace

Holy cow, I thought I remembered this book. But I didn’t have a clue.

I can’t even remember if I read it in 9th or 10th grade. I vaguely remember me and all my pals being excited over the release of the sequel, Peace Breaks Out, a year or two later. I can also remember a sustained protest that if it was true I had a Gene/Phineas type relationship with my best friend, which I didn’t, goodness me no, then I was much more like the charming, carelessly charismatic Phineas than the jealous, plotting Gene, for sure, right? Right, uh huh.

I certainly did not remember BLITZBALL, that wonderful precursor to CALVINBALL, or the Winter Carnival, or the great snowball fight near the end of the book. I didn’t even remember THE WAR, for goodness sake; the way it pervades the plot and the school atmosphere and mimics the emotional battles going on among the characters.

Nor did I remember the stark contrast of Summer and Winter—the green, gold landscape of summer and the snowbound landscape of winter—mirroring the whole and undamaged Phineas of n the golden Summer Session, and the limping, embattled Phineas of the Winter Session—in apparent innocence and desperation embracing life as fiercely and joyously as ever—the violent “attempts” on his life don’t kill him. It’s only when his spirit is broken as well as his body, by the “trial” and the recognition of his own betrayal, that he’s truly killed.

“What I mean is,” he says, “I love winter, and when you really love something , then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.” Which Gene immediately refutes: “I didn’t think that this was true…” Which bit doesn’t he believe—Finny’s love for winter, or its return of that love? Because it’s exactly how their relationship works. Gene never believes in the love Finny has for him. He always thinks it’s faked, or conditional. But it isn’t. And Gene loves him back in his own jealous, conditional, treacherous, generous way, giving back to Finny all he can, and resenting it the whole time.

And my god, does Finny make the most out of winter, limping his way through it like the Fisher King--presiding over the Winter Carnival, organized and dictated by himself, and the great snowball fight (“the Hitler Youth outing”) in which he plays such a chameleonic role that it can only be ended by everybody turning on him—and he goes down laughing.

Phineas, wonderful Finny, I wept for him this morning as I know I didn’t weep for him when I read the book at 14, before I understood it.

”Finny,” my voice broke but I went on, “Phineas, you wouldn’t be any good in the war, even if nothing had happened to your leg… They’d get you some place at the front and there’d be a lull in the fighting, and the next thing anyone knew you’d be over with the Germans or the Japs, asking if they’d like to field a baseball team against our side. You’d be sitting in one of their command posts, teaching them English. Yes, you’d get confused and borrow one of their uniforms, and you’d lend them one of yours. Sure, that’s just what would happen. You’d get things so scrambled up nobody would know who to fight any more. You’d make a mess, a terrible mess, Finny, out of the war.”

Part of the reason I picked this book up now, after 30 years, is because there are certain things about the Gene/Phineas relationship that I’ve been thinking about as I work on my current book—coincidentally also set in 1942-1943. So I expected to find some resonance for me here. But I would have never said, indeed I never have said, that this book was one of the earliest influences on The Winter Prince. And it’s terribly obvious to me now that it must have been. I ought to get kicked in the teeth for not including it in that odd little canon.

--------------------------

One thing I did remember was Leper Lepellius’s psychotic reaction to Basic Training. I will forever associate the term “Section 8 Discharge” with Leper. And when he said he was skiing off to find a beaver dam, I immediately related this to insanity and expected to see a dam built by a crazy beaver turn up somewhere in the plot, but then it turned out I was grafting the crazed beaver dam from Rose Rita’s cockamamie story of how her parents were killed by a rabid beaver in John Bellairs’s The Letter the Witch and the Ring. Too much knowledge….

unpopular opinion time

This book was very boring and hard to pay attention to. It was mostly taken back in World war two. It conflicts with envy and jealously. I really didn't like this book because it was hard to get into it and the whole plot of the book was very dry and empty.

I suggest this book for people who really get into books easy and like books about childhood maturity and about stupid mistakes. This book does not have any intense parts. The climax is very weak. A very random even happens which is the climax and knowone could have guessed it was coming.

This book was a horrible book.

First read in 1986. Re-read 21-28 Jan. 2012.
4 ½ stars--I can't quite bring myself to award it 5, perhaps out of a sense of sentimental injustice. …Or because Phineas doesn't have a last name. That bugged me, so I Googled it and turned up discussions of how Phineas is a symbol. Symbol or not, when everybody else has last names, he should've had one, too.
I'd convinced myself that I'd read this book more than once before now, but I realised quickly when I picked it up again that I hadn't. It made such a strong emotional impression on me that I never forgot reading it…but I forgot most of the actual content. All I really remembered was likeable, seventeen-year-old Phineas' tragic death, coming when the worst seemed over, after his friend caused him to fall out of a tree. I didn't even recall the narrator's/Phineas' friend's name! I don't remember any classroom discussion of the book, just an assignment of writing a letter from Phineas to his friend.
For such a short book, it packs a hell of a punch and kept my brain spinning after I'd put the book down. It's personal, yet universal. The way John Knowles shows the personal warfare of friendship and rivalry in the context of a world at war is brilliant. Is it human nature to create conflict, to make trouble where there is none? The author seems to think so. I didn't get the full message when I was a teenager, that's for sure.
On the personal level, Phineas' and Gene's friendship made me think of a friend I used to have, someone who was more impulsive and charismatic than I, someone I was at times jealous of. So I understand Gene's feelings in general, if not the depth of them. What he does to Phineas in a moment of paranoid, jealous rage is shocking. At that moment, he's too immature to understand he could have refused any of Phineas' invitations and schemes and Phineas wouldn't have cared. Phineas could be a smartass, but he wasn't mean-spirited. Whatever chaos he caused was temporary and just in boyish fun. He considered Gene a true friend, incapable of doing something so cruel as making him fall out of the tree and shatter his leg. The betrayal is heartbreaking.
Their timid friend Leper's loss of sanity is obvious, but the portrayal of both Phineas' and Gene's attempts to cope with situations at times had me doubting their sanity. I wanted to like Gene, or to pity him, but it was impossible to do so continually. His hostility toward Phineas and his focus on keeping his secret verged on sociopathic. His violent outburst against Leper, who knows Gene's secret, is almost as bad as what he did to Phineas.
Ultimately Gene does feel guilt for what he's done, and it's clear he knows he behaved badly and will carry the scar for the rest of his life. Their classmate Brinker's desire to get at the truth, to make Phineas remember and/or Gene confess, turns out to be prelude to the final tragedy--Phineas' second fall and the surgery that kills him. …But, like Briony's "atonement" in Ian McEwan's book, apologies or good intentions will never be enough. A moment's action led to a permanent loss that can never be fixed or changed.
The book also made me revisit my feelings about warfare and people's attitudes toward it. It's an amazing depiction of ambivalence about war. The author presents Leper, who buys into the propaganda and enlists, only to lose his mind; Brinker, who doesn't really believe in war but whose father constantly pushes him to join up for the sake of having good war stories to tell; Gene, who's saved from the self-punishment of early enlistment by Phineas' return to school, only to later join the Navy in hope of staying out of combat while still feeling guilty about it; and Phineas, whose pretense of not believing in the war was only a cover for his thwarted hopes of joining up. While I respect people who risk their lives to protect others or uphold an ideal, I have a problem with the glorification of war. The black-and-white, us-versus-them idea of war is such a lie, when armies are made up of individuals. I love the part of the book in which Gene tells Phineas he wasn't cut out for warfare because he'd probably end up crossing enemy lines to organise an impromptu game with the Germans or the Japanese.
For the most part, the writing displays a nice economy in language. The author gets to the point without going overboard but manages to employ some lyrical, original turns of phrase. There were a few times I stumbled over some wording, sometimes for what I deemed lack of a comma or two. But the author realistically captures the lives people try to carve out for themselves when the "real world out there"--whether it's war or college or work--seems remote and almost imaginary or, at its worst, like a nightmare.

I read this book for school and I expected it to be boring. Gene and Finny are "best friends" at the all boys school Devon. They live there during WWII and all of the boys who will graduate are being prepared to going off to the war. Gene is a more intellectual and studious student while Finny is the opposite being athletic and carefree. The book is told as a memory of Gene when he is older. Gene is extremely jealous of Finny and it causes Gene to push him out of the tree thus breaking his leg. The rest of the book you see these boys go through the war, jealousy, competition, and grief.

È vero che bisognerebbe tenere conto del periodo in cui è stato scritto, nel nostro caso 1959. Ma da una storia così sterile, condita di personaggi asettici tra cui un narratore anaffettivo e ipocrita, ne fuoriesce un libro che si dimentica presto e con facilità. La scrittura stessa è pesante e priva di emozione, inutilmente allungata (letto in ebook la media di lettura a capitolo si aggira sui 25 minuti ciascuno). Raga, no. Non capisco che insegnamento se ne possa trarre dato che in America viene incluso ancora oggi nei programmi scolastici. Per quanto mi riguarda, le sole cose che se ne ricavano sono la crudeltà e l'invidia già presenti in età adolescenziale. L'essere umano non cambia, maledizione. Non. Cambia.
Tre stelle arrotondando per eccesso.

uptight boy loves free spirit boy but is too uptight to admit it. fat-ass boy tries to get in the way. then, betrayal.

I hated this book. It took itself far too seriously, in its portrayal of the deep, emotional, almost homo-erotic relationship between two rich white aristocratic prep school boys in the '40s. Of course, a proponent of this book would argue that the love between them is not repressed homosexuality, but rather a deeper bond of friendship than most of us could dream of. Well, it's not. It is slow and tries to attach deep meaning to everything in the book, showing the overwhelming affection and guilt felt by the protagonist. I have hated this book from the moment I started it. It may be a classic, but a lot of the time, classics take themselves far too seriously, and everyone is fooled into thinking that that makes them incredible books. Well, to hell with that. I'm gonna come out and say it: this book should be banned from any curriculum it is in.

What makes a book last and last, continued to be read? I want to know because, if at all possible, that's the kind of book I'd like to write. Here's a book that was first published in 1959 and which I read when I was sixteen and now fifty or so years later I read again. It is the story of two friends, Gene and Phineas in a New Hampshire elite boarding school as War World II rages and awaits them. The forces of evil played out in the macrocosm of Europe and in the microcosm of a boy's soul. I read this book again because when you read a great book for the second or third time, you can afford to slow down and see how the author does what he does. What I wanted to see most of all was how envy and guilt and goodness and forgiveness are shown, portrayed, painted carefully by craftsman, in the way the characters speak, in the particular sequence of their words, in the way they walk, in the movement of their eyes and even in the architecture of the buildings and in the icy New England landscape. Nouns and adjectives for emotions are rare. The word "envy" was used once. I wasn't told how people felt, but I could see and feel what they were feeling without being told. This, this is why books last. And not just the way they are written but also the truth they convey, truth immediately recognizable and understood, as simple and concrete as a tree and so complicated that words cannot fully explain it.

Oh my God. To be honest, overall this book could have earned a 3 star. Key word: could.

Istg the main character Gene ruined the whole book for me though.

Cough cough. Okay. WHAT KIND OF PERSON CRIPPLES THEIR FRIEND ON PURPOSE BECAUSE HE'S JEALOUS AND PARANOID THAT HIS FRIEND, FINNY, IS OUT TO SABOTAGE HIM?? HUH?? AND THEN THIS INDIRECTLY LEADS TO FINNY'S DEATH. SCREW YOU GENE. His best friend was the only non-garbage character in the book, and they had to kill him off. UGH AND GENE DIDN'T EVEN CARE WHEN HE DIED. Absolutely disgusted. Gene is the worst main character of all time. Fight me. There are like 189479027419247329 more things I could rant about it but imma just shut up. Peace.

So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all — plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.

Change is the nature of things. Changes are brought by time.
We grow up and become different… The world around us keeps changing… Our memories pale and grow distorted… And eventually our adolescence turns into a faraway land.
We try to revisit our past and to analyze it and often it looks bleak and unfriendly.

They unrolled away impervious to me as though I were a roaming ghost, not only tonight but always, as though I had never played on them a hundred times, as though my feet had never touched them, as though my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or rather that everything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

But all the things we are leaving behind leave their imprint on our mind, soul and psyche forging our individuality.