“It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.”

To put it plainly, this book astonished me! It was alive with a plethora of my favorite literary elements and explorations of: loyalty, friendship, captivating descriptions, simple lyricism, poignant aspects of war, and examinations of the human condition. The list is endless really. 

The story begins 15 years after the events of the story occur. Gene, our first person narrator is visiting his old (all-boys) private school, Devon, which he attended in 1942, during the early years of the second world war. He visits two specific and personal places on the school grounds; as the reader, you do not know the significance of these sites until Gene brings us back in time to his days at Devon. As he was walking to and from these noteworthy places, it started to rain, making his jaunt around the grounds a very muddy one. He then says, “Changed, I headed back through the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come in out of the rain.” Then the next line brings us back 15 years and sets the rest of the story in motion. 

What I found so moving about this type of transition from present to past, was the way he used the element of rain to signify his past memories. “...it was time to come in out of the rain.” It was time to leave these things remembered, and move on. What we later realize is that Gene is unable to move on. 

16 year old Gene then introduced us to his room mate and best friend Phineas. A smooth talking, daredevil athlete, who’s handsome features Gene can’t help but describe in stunning detail. “Phineas just walked serenely on, or rather flowed on, rolling forward in his white sneakers with such unthinking unity of movement that “walk” didn’t describe it.” I myself couldn’t help but feel a degree of infatuation as I read this line, and many more concerning even Phineas’ mere movements and tone of voice. Even the way his eyes shined their hazel green was transcribed to us. Was this Gene’s inner desire coming through, or a hint of jealousy? That is left up to the reader. 

This book is one that puts a lot of weight and meaning into its title. As I read, I kept circling the amount of times “peace” was used in a sentence, and ultimately I lost count. John Knowles illustrates, in a very affecting way, the indirect effects that the war had on these young boys. “Why go through the motions of getting an education and watch the war chip away at the one thing I had loved here, the peace, the measureless, careless peace of the Devon summer?” This feeling that war and peace are muddled together can also be compared to the way Gene and Phineas also “are muddled together.” I’ll let you find out which one is war and which one is peace. I will also leave you with this last quote, because I find it confoundingly raw. “What deceived me was my own happiness; for peace is indivisible, and the surrounding world confusion found no reflection inside me. So I ceased to have any real sense of it.”

This book broke my heart, but at least it did it while using beautiful words.

This grimly intense story about boys in a boarding school during the summer of 1942 was painful to read. Not that it was not well-written, it was (which is why it got that third star). And I did get caught up in the storyline, I wanted to find out what happened next. But I could not seem to feel any sympathy for any of the
characters except Leper.

The boys know they will soon face the gruesome realities of WWII, and this knowledge affects each student differently. Besides that threat running through each page, there are layers beneath layers of interactions between the boys themselves, especially the two main characters Phineas and Gene (our narrator).

I didn't like Phineas, he was too flighty, manipulative, and egotistical. I tried to like Gene, but he was afraid to face his own truths, afraid to dare to be different and he always allowed himself to follow everywhere that Phineas led him, like a tame sheep. Naturally there would have been no story at all without the chaos caused by these attitudes, but I kept hoping that Gene would face facts at some point and take his life in a whole different direction than the way it turned out.

This book was on a class reading list years and years ago in high school, but I chose other titles at that time. I'm glad I finally read it, but I was not as impressed by it as I expected to be.

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.

this book devastated me.

i read it in high school, like most people. it was the year with all the "classics" that everyone has read at some point in schooling, all depicting young adults in various stages of angst or 19th century high drama or epic poems. whatever.

but this book gave me such a strong physical reaction - i sobbed and felt ill through so much of this story. i think i related too much with the characters for my own good, and the psychological slap-around of the evil in every person was a little hard to handle. all the jealousy and rivalry and the nasty toe gunk of human nature gets shoved down your throat like a horse pill. i saw a lot of myself in gene, and i was desperately in love with finny, or more specifically the idea of him. all my emotions were bigger and more innocent then, and i was torn to pieces.

the passages about revolting against the adult schema rocked my world. i can't remember them specifically anymore, but i just remember underlining and re-reading and re-reading through all the tears. i tried to pick up this book recently, when i found it in a stack of my high school material, but i just couldn't read it again. i think i would rather have the tragically strong memories of this book not be clouded by my older and better judgement.

oh god. with the pool? and breaking that record! oh, and leper with the going crazy in the army! and the tree. and the staircase. oh, i'm feeling ill all over again.

An eternally profound take on war and a cornerstone of the dark academia genre. What a joy to revisit a work that has had such an impact on my literary perspective.

CW/TW: war themes, injury, toxic relationship, death, character death, mental illness, ableism, g-slur, racism, alcohol consumption

I'll make one comment about this book. For me, the heart of the story was the friendship between the two boys--Gene and Phineas. Gene is the introvert, the studious boy, Phineas the extrovert, the "natural" leader of the boys and, of course, a star athlete. I related to Gene and thought about relationships I've had with boys who have had elements of Phineas' personality. I can't say I've had such a close relationship with a Phineas type. I could see how such a friendship could also involve feelings of resentment and become rivalry at least at times.... A book to revisit time and time again.

This stayed on by TBR list since highschool. Can't believe it took 20 years to get to it. One of my all time favorite books. Every emotion and nuance I felt. Every worry and anxiety I felt. Truly remarkable story about choices we make and the perceptions we hold onto too long. Must read!

I hadn’t thought of writing a review of this book until I read how many people disliked it. Far from wanting to simply "prove" others were wrong, I began thinking about why others might not like this book and its message. First, it is somewhat legitimate to dislike anything one must read in high school. However, if you never get past that point, life isn't much worth living. If you never come back and read some of the things on your own, you just aren't much of a human being. Rant as one will against the unpleasantness of secondary educational methods, sooner or later, one ought to recognize that explaining value the wrong way isn't a denial of the concept. With that said, I still don't care for the heavy handedness of symbolism in, say, Billy Budd.

Second, I began to think about all the people today who run away from hit and run accidents, ostensibly for selfish reasons, and I tried to see if there was some sort of parallel with issues of honor and accountability and the apparent plethora of irresponsible behavior. While there may be some grain of truth to this, I think this book's message evades the modern mind on still another level.

This book is a bit heavy handed on the imagery also, beginning with a snotty group at a prep school. In a day when rich people appear somewhat vile to some, (perhaps because they must be forced to share their wealth with us,) perhaps a prep school doesn't serve as a good choice setting in which to begin. When I first read this book years ago, I recall feeling so alienated from the setting that I thought that whatever ills happened to anyone at this school, they all deserved it just because they were there. Unfortunately, all that feeling did was make me feel uncomfortably similar to Gene. I thought the Super Suicide Society was a bit silly too, perhaps an anachronism or even doing Hitler’s SS an extra letter for heavy symbolism. It was, at the same time, too juvenile and yet too replete with boyish bravado.

The two main characters are, nevertheless, interesting. I think that Gene is the kind of everyman with a touch more paranoia thrown in, suspecting that everyone must think pretty much like he does, even if it is done in secret. Finny (and how can anyone today admire someone named Phineas?) is the perfect antagonist. He is the one who can flaunt tradition but do so with such an open heart that he is automatically popular. From what I read about about John F. Kennedy, the two seem to have the same charisma, maybe even the same persona. Gene knows that if he tried half of what Finny did, he couldn't pull it off. The rest of us know it about ourselves too. This includes the elitist, Brinker Hadley. The book is worth reading just being able to watch people like Hadley squirm. Yet once again, perhaps we don't see these characterizations much any more in what has unfortunately become a PC society.

Further I thought that the underlying theme of the war doesn't work very well any longer either, perhaps society as a whole becoming so isolated from any concept of the necessity of war, individuals unwilling to sacrifice for any means beyond personal gain. When you are facing an impending great uncertainty, you tend to do things which negate that kind of looming doom, just like these boys did. That’s something which is uncomfortable in itself, but perhaps our era of irresponsibility tends to dissolve our fear by making such things less inevitable.

However the main reason I believe that this book doesn't really carry a strong message to the modern reader is beyond all the things I have yet considered: the difficulty with appreciating this book isn’t an itinerant selfishness, the desire to remain individual rather than a small part of the whole, nor is it about the inability to relate to prep school, inevitable deniability or even the heavy symbolism. I tend to think that the failure to recognize the importance of this book's message is our unwillingness to acknowledge in some very fundamental way, the pain we ultimately incur upon ourselves in life through the necessity of our actions. This book essentially pulls out our dirty laundry which we have hidden away, perhaps something we today brag about being natural and therefore no longer sinful. Perhaps it is our modern inability to acknowledge our living sin as having missed the mark in our daily lives.

I can certainly recall very easily my feeling justified in my actions when younger which purposefully hurt others only to acknowledge silently later that I was so very wrong. As I see it, that is what this book is about, not so much making the mistake, something irretrievably wrong, but learning to deal with the kind of repercussions which follow from our original loathsome behavior. I tend to think that this book might have been better titled, An Odious Wrong, A Separate Peace. Still, even had the author considered this, he knew that it was the conclusion which was the important part, the part which makes one a human being, being able to find a forgiveness of self rather than carrying the weight around forever. It is hard enough to face one’s mistakes.…and clearly this is an uncomfortable process for us, but it is a greater thing to be able to find a peace so that one can continue to not only exist but to live and prosper.

John Knowles wrote this somewhat autobiographical novel about some young men in a boarding school when on the brink of being drafted or enlisted into the second world war. Like Brideshead Revisited, it focuses on two young men, one somewhat under the thrall of another, with tragic consequences. Along the way there is surprising action.

“Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person “the world today” or “life” or “reality” he will assume that you mean that moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.”

This book is filled with quotable ideas and descriptions.

“Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”

“It was only long after that I recognized sarcasm as the protest of people who are weak.”

“It had, in one word, glamour, absolute schoolboy glamour.”

“Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.”

“Sixteen is the key and crucial and natural age for a human being to be, and people of all other ages are ranged in an orderly manner ahead of and behind you as a harmonious setting for the sixteen-year-olds of the world.”

“It wasn’t the cider which made me surpass myself, it was this liberation we had torn from the gray encroachments of 1943, the escape we had concocted, this afternoon of momentary, illusory, special and separate peace.”

When I was 16, there were high school seniors who felt a concocted exuberance as they were about to be drafted into the Vietnam War, and you could just substitute the year 1966.

For me, this book hovers between 4 and 4.5 stars, but as I examine all of the writing that caused me to stop and consider what was being said, I will settle on 4.5, which is pretty darn good.

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.

Book Review: A Separate Peace
By Logan Loring

The book A Separate Peace by John Knowles, isn’t a book that I think is worth reading.
Throughout the many parts of the book there aren’t many scenes that are exciting or jump out at you. If there are any exciting scenes, then there are very few of them. If you’re thinking about reading a book with the school story genre then A Separate Peace isn’t the book you should choose. In this book there are some new scenes every now and then, but when that new scene or any scene is, it tends to go on forever and most of them are pretty boring. You have to love reading if you think that reading A Separate Peace is exciting. Some parts can get to be confusing if you don’t follow along that well throughout the book. There are parts were you can’t tell if they are going from past to present tense. Once again you have to love reading or you can just understand it really well to know when the story switches tenses.

Right time, right place, right book: triple axis of alignment, all shook up. I don’t say ‘masterpiece’ often, but this is what ’a separate peace is’: no if, buts and doubts. An understated study of the death of the soul.

On a personal level, it resonates with me because I too, did something incredibly ill conceived a couple of years ago, and just like Gene Forrester, it hangs over my head like the sword of Damocles: a silent, corrosive necrotisis of the soul. There is only one way to score peace on this earth: when Gene says ‘my war ended before I ever put on a uniform’, what he means is his life ended. Not his existence: he goes on to eat, sleep, shit and fuck, but not really to live. Its a defence mechanism really: to eradicate the pain, you have to stop caring. If there is nothing to care about, pain becomes obsolete. But. So does love, joy de vivre and happiness. Gene Forrester and I, shared eharmony.

Beautifully written, suspenseful, psychologically tortuous study of whats real and what is mirage, friendship and enmity, good and evil, pinned on a hauntingly escalating plot structure of thriller cum horror.

Gene Wilder. My doppelganger. :Who is he? Who are his people? He appears at a New England School from the Midwest(?) and already he is a step apart: an outsider. Not as athletic, o witty as his friend Finny, Gene looks for his niche: a place to assert himself. But what if you’ve got nothing? Well. You always have easy access to this Hydra, if you want to tap that water: ambition. Gene is going be academic. Rote leaning ensues: there is no joy in learning, there is no accumulation of knowledge wealth: only a stockpile of grades, earned with blood and sweat, and maybe resentment. This stockpile, this tower of achievement, the house that the ‘wiseman’ built on sand: it sometimes has the tendency to lean, like the tower of Pisa. And then, everybody knows . That you worship false gods. And when Finny finds out that Gene simply isn’t a natural (at all this studying), all hell breaks loose. There is probably only one main difference between Gene and myself. When I lash out, its usually to harm myself than someone else. But, in the end, thats a moot point, because, as Gene’s little story shows so tersely, hurting someone else is just the same as hurting yourself. Perhaps worse. You can forgive yourself for inflicting all kinds of self harm, but you can never absolve yourself for fucking some one else over. And, if that someone happens to forgive you , and you can’t forgive yourself, then its game over. Life without living.

Now, Gene and I have to go lick our wounds. Its almost night time: we both know the night ‘suspends but never resolves anything’. But its the only other way to score a temporary reprieve.