Every summer, I reread a classic from my past. This is my choice for 2013.

Niente dura, né un albero, né l'amore, né una morte violenta.

4,5 - Volevo leggere PACE SEPARATA da quando l'ho trovato menzionato a proposito di Dio di Illusioni o If we were villains, come uno dei capostipiti del genere #darkacademia e un romanzo amatissimo dalle generazioni americane fin dalla sua apparizione negli anni '50.
Ci è voluto un po' per recuperarlo, ma questa piccola edizione mi ha tenuto compagnia per varie sere: pur essendo breve, sentivo che la storia di Gene e del suo ultimo periodo all'istituto Devon meritava di essere assaporata lentamente.

Nel fondo del mio animo, là dove i sentimenti, lenti e silenziosi, diventano più forti dei pensieri,
si era formata l’impressione che l'istituto Devon fosse nato il giorno in cui c'ero entrato io,
avesse vissuto di una vita vera e vibrante finché io ci avevo studiato e si fosse spento, come una candela, quando io ne ero uscito.

Il racconto parte anni dopo, quando il protagonista ritorna tra le mura del suo vecchio collegio esclusivo, dove studiavano i rampolli delle migliori famiglie dell'est. Nell'estate e nell'autunno 1942 la classe dell'ultimo anno, diciassette-diciotto anni, trascorre giorni forsennati, in attesa della chiamata di leva o del futuro che batte alle porte.
La guerra mondiale strazia il mondo, all'esterno, ma in collegio la vita è come sospesa sotto una campana, la natura fa il suo corso, si susseguono le lezioni, la vita nel dormitorio, le fughe a fumare, a camminare tra i boschi o a nuotare nel fiume e sfidarsi con la Società dei super suicidi, durante pomeriggi di "di momentanea, illusoria, eccezionale pace separata."

Forse a tratti la narrazione è prolissa, però, a parte lo stile che risente di quando fu scritto, questo è un romanzo pur sempre introspettivo, dove Gene mette a nudo la propria coscienza e dove le descrizioni vivide del paesaggio che muta intorno rappresentano lo stato d'animo dei ragazzi.
Nonostante la falsa spensieratezza, c'è un senso di tragedia incombente, c'è lo scontro tra Gene, studioso, ambizioso, forse pure calcolatore, e Finny, bellissimo, esuberante, generoso, con un fisico atletico perfetto.

Era difficile ricordare, nell'inebriante e sensuale chiarore di quelle mattine; dimenticavo che odiavo e chi mi odiava. Avrei voluto liberarmi piangendo da simili pugnalate di gioia disperata, di promessa intollerabile, perché quelle mattine erano troppo piene di bellezza per me, perché un mondo così bello non poteva contenere tanto odio.

Ci sono le gelosie, le paure, le attrazioni non rivelate e soffocate, ci sono i sentimenti violenti dell'adolescenza, fino a un risvolto ineluttabile e che toglie ogni possibilità di riscatto.
Si resta con l'amarezza, scossi dentro: comprendo perché tante cose siano state poi riprese da autori successivi e perché questo libro abbia segnato generazioni e generazioni.

Non riuscivo a sottrarmi alla sensazione che fosse il mio funerale, e al proprio funerale non si piange.

My first novel.

Tiring of typical grade school fare I surreptitiously ordered A Separate Peace from the "other side" of the monthly Bantam book order form - unbeknownst to my Mother and my teacher. As grade school and high school books were shipped intermingled I plucked my order from the school shipment the moment the boxes were opened. Before I even opened the book I sensed that if I wanted to finish it, I better do so secretly.

I had no trouble reading the piece from a vocabulary standpoint but more importantly I found I was capable of transcending my years in grasping the mature subject matters it proposed. In retrospect I probably had no business reading such a book at such an early age.

But I did.

And it forever changed my understanding of what books could be.

A close friendship becomes tragic when envy turns ugly and results in life-altering consequences.

Gene Forrester, the main character and narrator of the story, visits Devon, the boys prep school he attended as a teenager in New England.

Gene reflects upon his close friendship with Phineas, or “Finny” and the tragic events that took place at Devon during the summer and fall of wartime 1942.

Finny, a lovable character, is perfection personified as portrayed through Gene’s loving eyes. The loving friendship between the two young men is left open to interpretation.

A highly recommended classic coming of age story.

“It seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart”

I had a lot of conflicts with this book just from the beginning.

On the first several pages, Phineas sounded like an exact Voldemort with his ability to please the others with his rightly chosen words, and later I couldn't get rid of that image in my head.

Second, I couldn't understand Gene, the protagonist, as deeply as I should have, maybe the timing wasn't right for this book, maybe I just missed some things. In any case, I didn't get emotional and related to him.

And of course the main thing - the war. All along the book, I couldn't get rid of the idea how the war was praised in the minds of those boys. It wasn't the main theme of the book, not that apparent, but I could feel it. Naturally, boys love to play battles and wars, as girls love to play being mothers and carrying for their dolls while they are little. But to idealize war when you are about 16, to want to be part of it, without fully realizing what you are getting into, was not convincing for me. At least, the characters couldn't convince me otherwise, I couldn't see their motives.

I know, because I've seen war, I've seen the determination the young soldiers, who decided to enlist voluntarily, hold in their minds, I've seen their motives just by looking at their faces. Those characters didn't have that.

As for the writing, it was very "neat" - short, strict, precise, without any artificial prolongation. However, the perfect prose couldn't show me the deptհ of characters. Pity. It would have been a perfect book.

It is entirely possible that, were I to reread this today, it wouldn't rise to the lofty height at which it hazily soars within the literary shrine of my memory. But back in the day I thought that Knowles had crafted a powerhouse story that punched a number of those buttons—including that of the precariousness of forming and framing an image of oneself in relation to another—dialed directly into the heart and soul of a teenage boy, especially one with the experience of itinerancy and thus an acute sensitivity to the cleavability of friendship.

As it is, I am going to wax Sastreatic upon the enduring popularity of A Separate Peace, which can perhaps be attributed principally to the manner in which Knowles marries an emotionally tautened and harrowing portrayal of the tempestuous inner turmoils of adolescent souls compressed into close quarters, their innate rivalries and companionships and immersions into spontaneously-sprung personal proving grounds, with a more age-unspecific delineation of the perilously paranoid mental realm of the intellectual as set in perceived opposition against a competition endowed with gifts of a purely material and/or spiritual nature—mind against body when the latter includes its atomized ideation—and an allegorical updating of the sacrificial self-deicide that forms the locus from which the Christian religions are derived. Gene's momentary generation of kinetic waves, which results in Phineas' immediate, limb-shattering fall and consequent stair-struck death, occurs in an instantaneous alliance between the rational and irrational forces of his mind—the id and ego coming to agreement in a mutual determination to cleanse a determined enemy when the opportunity fortuitously presents itself. Unless it didn't, at which point the Satanic allegiance of that very last pairing is limned starker in an infernal hall of mirrors.

In the aftermath Knowles presents the reader with three branchings of flowering and potentiality-laden guilt: that of a young man who has grievously hurt a true friend from the basest of motives and most uncharitable of misperceptions; that of a prodigious intelligence becoming starkly cognizant of all the dangers immanent within the razored edges of an unsheathed intellect; and that of a soul, burdened by the dread weight and occluding shadows of existential gravity, given a means of lightening both load and path ahead through the self-reflection engendered by an innocent being's sacrifice—a sense of one's temporal placement born of an absence whose voided nature imparts that very sensational awareness. But these layered revelations would not suffice were it not for the story that Knowles crafted to address them; and this mid-century portrayal of teenage conflict and conflicted states, enacted within a world aflame with its own brutally metastasized, war-wrought projection of the same, is shaped to perfection. Moving, absorbing, thoughtful, cathartic, all within a tightly-measured fictive framework: this is why A Separate Peace has achieved the status of an American classic.

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.

So I just finished A Separate Peace and I have mixed feelings on it. It wasn’t a quick read and it forced me to think a lot, especially towards the end. Throughout the book I kept wondering why Knowles kept bringing up the war and how it contributed to the plot. Maybe while Gene and Finny were dealing with their own relationship, the rest of the world had their own sort of enemy. I took it as even after Finny dies, the world goes on. Gene moves on, and he feels this grand relief like he’s accomplished something great. In his narrative he talks about Finny taking the anger from him when he died, yet I can’t see what Gene could ever be angry about. Finny deserves all those feelings.

The title makes absolutely NO SENSE. I love that feeling when you’re reading, and halfway through the book you finally understand the meaning of the title, but for the first time, I have no clue what it means. There is absolutely nothing peaceful at all in this book.

Obviously no one is born inherently evil, but honestly Gene really contradicts that. I’ve honestly never hated a protagonist more than him. Sometimes I have to remind myself that there are people out there like him, who think and act like him. I’m still trying to understand how he could ever do that to Finny, when Finny had always been a good, genuine friend the entire time. I think Gene has a complex and he thinks the world is out to get him. The fact that he could ever think Finny envied him for being the best in his class just baffles me.

It was so much worse when Finny tried to make excuses for Gene, like, “I know you didn’t mean it” or “I know, I believe you.” It makes me so MAD that Finny will never get to see his twenties or his thirties, that he’ll never get to be an athlete and pursue his dreams. He deserved that happiness more than anyone in this book. I know one of the main themes in this book is jealousy, but the ending was so unnecessary and unfair and dramatic. Finny didn’t have to die. Actually I GET why he had to die, because Knowles was trying to portray the faults of human nature and how it almost never changes. I guess if he hadn’t made Finny die, the message wouldn’t be AS CLEAR but STILL, I think he could’ve found another way to convey that. I’m really sad because Gene deserved to die and I hate him so much but honestly WHO CAN BE THAT EVIL? That was his best friend, and I TOTALLY get it if you feel jealous because he’s so talented BUT YOU’RE SO SMART YOURSELF. THAT’S YOUR OWN INSECURITY AND YOU NEED TO GET OVER IT, NOT HATE ON OTHER PEOPLE, LET ALONE YOUR BEST FRIEND. Plus, I’ve never heard of anyone taking action from their jealousy. I couldn’t believe it when Gene started referring to Finny as his enemy, when he knew how Finny needed him and felt like he was “an extension” of him. I’d completely get it if the hatred was a mutual thing, but Finny loved him SO MUCH and that hurts my heart. I don’t think I’ll ever understand that, how you could hate someone even when they love you.

I think Finny is such a beautiful character. He didn’t understand how evil Gene was and how his friend could hate him so much, and I think that’s what hurt him in the end. He was so good and pure and he didn’t deserve someone so cruel.

A coming of age novel, with WW2 as a backdrop. I felt a similarness to To Serve Them All My Days which I really enjoyed very much. Both are set in Devon, but this novels focus was from a students perspective, Gene. He is a young man who has a close friendship with Phineas, Finny. Finny is a charasmatic boy, who seems to buck the trend in all areas of his life, he's quite a character and I really enjoyed him. We follow Gene as he returns to school many years later, and the story falls into place. A short novel which I enjoyed, my first of John Knowles. I enjoyed his development of these two boys and could definitely 'feel' them and their growing friendship, he captured nicely the 'toing and frowing' of Gene's internal conflict in his assumption of what Finny is feeling, when he second guesses things and gets them wrong, you could see the internal teenagers 'wheels in motion' as he grapples with self conscious feelings and learning about himself as he goes along. I was left wanting a little bit more at the end, but I still would recommend this book. I came across it mentioned in a recent book I read, and learned that this is an American Classic and I do understand why.

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.

Atmospheric, touching and lugubrious novel with war constantly in the background. Gene, now as an adult reflecting back on his life at Devon School and his relationship with his friend, Phineas (or Finny).
Nothing much happens for most part of the book ; it has a sense of quietness. In the middle I was a bit bored. The characters are well-drawn especially the character of Finny; Knowles describes every movement, every expression and tone of voice in a vivid detail.
Friendship, jealousy, loyalty and kindness. Wrong impressions, misinterpretation of thought and action which fuels jealousy and colors judgement. How well we know and trust our own friends who are close to us. Gene, who misjudges Phineas and Phineas who blindly believes that his friend can't do him any harm. Gene doesn't fully realize the gravity of his crime and it's repercussions. But, he is courageous to confess it.
And, then there is war always looming and casting its grim shadow over lives of characters. There's world war II and an introspective war against one's inner thoughts and self. In school, no one exercised any real discipline; standards and rules are compromised.

"Wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart."

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

This is an American classic? Why? Now I’m not saying that it’s a bad novel. I just don’t see how it’s a particularly great one.

Perhaps, it’s ultimately because the book never worked to make me identify with the situation where the event took place. Instead, the entire conflict felt contrived. We are told of an atmosphere of driven competition in a school where everyone is an enemy and no one a real friend. But except being told so by Gene no one else in the book seems to notice this. I can imagine though that if this culture is something you recognise as being part and parcel of adolescence and school life, then the book would immediately and powerfully resonate.

Me? This relentless fight and struggle that fuels the conflict at the centre of the book never felt real, and so the book’s heart of darkness felt more like an evanescent shadow play rather than the savage fight it is supposed to be. It certainly did not grip me with the power of the classic depictions of innate human savagery that predated it: Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies spring to mind. As a result, the last few paragraphs of the novel—their conclusions on human nature—don’t seem to have been earned, and so, don’t convince.

The other possibility, of course, is that this vicious struggle is wholly and only in Gene’s mind. If all there is to the conflict is Gene’s personal hate and envy of goodness and his desire to destroy it—that this is the something “fundamentally ignorant about the human heart”—then I find the novel somewhat repugnant. And not because the hate and envy are repugnant, but because the act of cruelty powered by those emotions is what saves Gene. He is rendered free of hate because he hated Finny.

Yes, that’s “because” not “despite”, because it is through this act that he confronts his own darkness (is prevented from erecting his own Maginot Line) and purges himself of hating other people. He even achieves success later in life.

That notion, to me, is an inherently vile idea. Morally, it works only if we see Finny solely as symbolic and not real—in dying, the Christ-figure washes Gene’s sins away. There is no epiphany in arriving there: Gene has known all along that he acted deliberately. It is Finny’s realisation of Gene’s betrayal that brings about the book’s denouement. Gene himself never does anything to earn his forgiveness. Save for the one time he confesses to Finny and retracts, he subsequently keeps trying to weasel out of admitting it. As for that weepy, blubbering, “I didn’t mean it, it was just something ignorant in me. You believe me, don't you?” That’s supposed to make everything okay? All of which render the concluding paragraphs not simply hollow but repugnant and false.