یادمه وقتی این کتاب رو توی لیست خوندنم گذاشتم برای این بود که جایی خونده بودم شبیه ناتور دشته. شما مثل من گول نخورید. اصلا شبیه نیست. بیشتر شبیه ترکیبی از انجمن شاعران مرده‌اس، با شخصیت‌هایی که من اصلا باهاشون ارتباط برقرار نمی‌کردم و نمی‌تونستم دوستشون داشته باشم.

Set in the exclusive The Devon School, in New England, this is a moving and evocative coming of age novel. Gene Forrester and his friend Phineas are both sixteen years old. It is 1942 and the spectre of war and enlistment loom over them, but the story begins in a gilded summer, when it seems as though nothing bad could possibly happen to them.

Academic Gene is both exasperated by his roommate Phineas (Finny) and yet proud he has been chosen to be his closest friend and confidante. Finny is effortlessly a natural leader, an organiser, the sports star and always popular with the other boys. Gene finds himself dragged along in his wake, desperate to study and compete with Finny in the only way he knows how, and yet unable to avoid inclusion in his schemes. One of these is ‘The Super Suicide Society of the Summer Session,” which has a membership requirement of jumping from the limb of a tree and into the river. The jump is dangerous and Gene and Finny are required to make the leap before every meeting – something Gene never gets used to. One day, irritated and annoyed by Finny’s carefree behaviour, Gene climbs the tree and then does something he later comes to regret...

This is a story about friendship, competition, envy, unspoken accusations and the way closed knit communities, like schools, magnify and distort events. Of course, as the boys edge towards seventeen and enlisting becomes a real event in their lives, there is also the spectre of war and how that changes their lives and views of themselves. This is a classic I have never come across before, but I found it an intriguing and evocative read. Lastly, I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

everybody shut the FUCK up about manic pixie dream girls. society has progressed past the need for manic pixie dream girls. john knowles wrote the first and only manic pixie dream boy in 1959 and we're all just living in his world

I first read this book in high school, along with a number of other coming of age stories. The good ones, this among them, had a mystical quality for me. Like some adolescent Rosetta Stone, each one of these novels held a clue that would enable me to unlock the answers for growing into adulthood with integrity. I resist rereading these books as an adult because I know that when I bring them into the light of my reality some 40 years later, the mystical aura will dissipate. I am late reading this book group pick for that reason, but I finally gave in. I had remembered little of the details of this story set in a male boarding school in 1942, this story of friendship, of unspoken competition, of suppressed jealousy that can surface in an unguarded moment, but I did remember the major themes and the lessons I learned. As anticipated, the mystical aura is now burnt away but that does not mean that I disliked the book. I can still understand why this has had such enduring power. I think it is still found important themes worth exploring by an adolescent. 3.5 stars

A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age story set in a boarding school in Massachusetts in 1942-43. When the story opens, Phineas and Gene are sixteen year old boys, enjoying the last summer of innocence and freedom before they cross the line into draft age and are forced to face involvement in war. The talk of war is everywhere, the senior class is being conditioned for entry into it, and the young men waver between a desire to dive in and a fear that they will be required to.

Finny and Gene are roommates and best of friends, but it is a complicated friendship, and Gene is particularly unsure of what the relationship really means. When comparing himself to Finny, he feels an insecurity, almost a fear, that he is the lesser of the two. There is an undercurrent of competition and jealousy between them, with suppressed feelings of both anger and guilt, and they constantly break the rules and push one another too far. Perhaps because they are different in temperament, there is too much they fail to understand about one another.

Self-awareness, guilt and denial are emotions all of us deal with at some time, but they may be especially common when we are young and finding our way. Finny and Gene must pass from an ideal, innocent world into one of brutal reality, and how they deal with that reveals their individual strength of character and even determines their ability to survive.

This is a second reading for me, the first some fifty years ago. I was glad to find that the book affected me in much the same way as I had remembered, heart-wrenching and sadly tragic. It retains its 5-star rating–a book about youth, but not only for the young.

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.

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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….

I'm the kind of kid who always wanted to go to boarding school and be mischevious. This book is about as close as I ever got to fulfilling that dream. It takes place at a boy's preparatory school in New England in the early 1940s. Narrated by Gene Forester, a sort of Nick Carroway type but with passion, it tells the story of Phineas, a charismatic, good-hearted athlete who turns Gene's education into the sort of memory one looks back on with longing and maybe a tear. Phineas makes up new sports, denies the existence of WWII, breaks school records secretly just for the fun of it, and smooth-talks adults and peers alike. He sort of lives in his own reality. it is not a coming-of-age story, but more a character description. One day Phineas and Gene are jumping out a tree into a lake and Gene basically causes Phineas to fall, ending in a majorly broken leg. The central micro-conflict is Gene's guilt over deliberately hurting his best friend (who is thus unable to do sports or go to war) all the while Phineas is denying any wrong doing. Phineas is sort of too good for this world. Parelling the psychic conflict within Gene is WWII. I think one message of this book is about finding inner-peace in a world of conflict.

I read this book in high school and adored it. I think I adored it more the second time around. The prose of the book is thoughtful and full of simile. The characters, despite their micheviousness, are good at heart. It is thoughtful, interesting, and important.

One of my personal favorites.

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.

I was surprised with the many bad reviews of this book . I really enjoyed it. Very poetic , descriptive writing . Love this style of writing . It is a story of young boys trying to ready themselves for the war . It did not discuss the harshness of the war . It focused primarily on the connections with the young boys friendship while they were in school. It was a little depressing in some parts but overall a great read.

I never read any of the assigned reading in English in High School. In 10th grade, we did this book. The teacher gave a test on the book, and I got an A. Unfortunately, the rest of the class did miserably, and the teacher was extremely disappointed. So she decided to give a True/False quiz to test whether people had actually read it. I failed miserably, and she was dumbfounded. When she asked me about this, I told her I never read anything that was assigned because I found it more of a challenge to get an A without doing the reading. She made me promise that I would do the reading in the future, and I did promise.

And now, I can say I have kept that promise. I did all of the reading in the future, just not when it was assigned. For example, I read The Great Gatsby sometime in film school. The Grapes of Wrath after that. And so on... And with this book, I'm pretty sure that I have now completed all of the required reading from high school. I can also say that I would never have done it, if I had picked this one up early on. This is one that easily validates my policy back then.

The book does manage to be both overwrought and trivial at once, which is no small achievement. Everything is supposed to have the weight of portentousness, but for all that, there's very little substance. So, the little merit that this book has depends on the voice of Gene, the narrator. And he's thoroughly unlikeable and fairly unobservant. He pretends to be smart and observant, but he is more likely to project his inner world onto the outside than he is to capture anything interesting about the outside.

On top of all of this, the book is completely gay, but refuses to come out of the closet. This is manifest, from the wrestling, to the Finny's pink shirt, to the endless admiration of Finny's body, to Leper's losing touch by imagining women's heads on men's bodies. I am dumbfounded that Knowles insists that homosexuality has nothing to do with this book. I guess that just proves that authors are not always the best readers of their own work, and that Knowles' lack of self-awareness mirrors Gene's.

In short, a small, not particularly interesting story, with unlkeable characters and a narrator who has a few nice moments but, for the most part, is annoying. I have no idea why this makes for a "classic."

I always read my older brother's required reading books long before I was assigned them, and for some reason this book spoke to me even though I've never been to an ivy league prep school and I'm not a boy. I had this book memorized by the time I reached 10th grade.

A wonderful study of the conflict between a naturally gifted and well-liked young man and the jealous friend with low self-esteem. A great book that teaches a moral code that one should live by and the ability to finally let go of the past and "come in out of the rain."

I hope when my son is a teen he will enjoy this book as much as his mother did.