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Two English Girls and the Continent
Finally the English-speaking world can see what inspired Francois Truffaut to make one of his best films. How wonderful to finally have Henri-Pierre Roche's Two English Girls in translation!
238 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
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July 14, 2019
Als ich vor einigen Jahren zum ersten Mal dieses Buch las, stand ich zweifelsohne noch unter dem starken Einfluss der Verfilmung François Truffauts. Auch jetzt beim Lesen einer jeden Zeile werde ich die wie in Stein gemeißelten Bilder nicht los. Ich habe stets die Stimme des Erzählers im Ohr, obwohl ein solcher im Buch gar nicht existiert. Ich sehe Jean-Pierre Léaud als Claude vor mir sowie ich diese reizvolle Szene vor Augen habe, als er nach einem Regenguss auf dem Boden sitzt, behutsam in die Mitte genommen von den Schwestern, die ihn lustig hin und her wiegen. Oder saß er zwischen einer von ihnen und deren Mutter? - Das ist Claudes Dilemma und wurde zunehmend zu meinem. Er sitzt insgesamt zwischen vier Frauen: den englischen Schwestern Anne und Muriel, ihrer und seiner eigenen besitzergreifenden Mutter Claire. Es ist ein ewiges Hin und Her: obwohl Anne glaubt Claude zu lieben, will sie ihn mit Muriel verkuppeln. Muriel liebt ihn zunächst als Bruder. Claire sähe am liebsten gar keine Frau an der Seite ihres Sohnes. Mrs. Brown scheut ebenfalls die Heirat ihrer Tochter mit einem Franzosen. Und Claude? - Ja, was ist eigentlich mit ihm? Wen liebt er?
Genau hier hadere ich mit der ganzen Dreiecks-Geschichte von Monsieur Roché. Er legt sie uns in Form einer Korrespondenz zwischen Claude, Muriel und Anne vor, hier und da unterbrochen von Tagebucheintragungen. Dabei, finde ich, kommt mir Claudes Innenleben zu kurz und das insbesondere in der zweiten Hälfte des Buches. Er bleibt so schrecklich passiv, so unverändert. In zwanzig Jahren durchleben die Schwestern auffallende Veränderungen und Wechselbäder ihrer Gefühlswelt, während er lediglich ergraut und erduldet. - Dass er der Alte bleibt, stört mich keineswegs, aber ich hätte es gern vertieft gelesen. - So ertappte ich mich gen Ende beim Querlesen, weil sich Muriel in jeder ihrer Eintragungen oder Briefe nur wiederholte und mich zu langweilen begann.
Was Roché indes wunderbar gelang, war die formelle Trennung Muriels und Claude. Ihre Mütter vereinbaren ein einjähriges Trennungsjahr, in dem sie sich nicht sehen und einander nicht schreiben dürfen. Dieses erlebt der Leser durch ihre Einträge im Tagebuch, in nebeneinanderliegenden Spalten. - Die restliche Handlung bleibt mir jedoch zu unvollendet durchdacht und unausgereift sowie eine Spur zu schwülstig.
Genau hier hadere ich mit der ganzen Dreiecks-Geschichte von Monsieur Roché. Er legt sie uns in Form einer Korrespondenz zwischen Claude, Muriel und Anne vor, hier und da unterbrochen von Tagebucheintragungen. Dabei, finde ich, kommt mir Claudes Innenleben zu kurz und das insbesondere in der zweiten Hälfte des Buches. Er bleibt so schrecklich passiv, so unverändert. In zwanzig Jahren durchleben die Schwestern auffallende Veränderungen und Wechselbäder ihrer Gefühlswelt, während er lediglich ergraut und erduldet. - Dass er der Alte bleibt, stört mich keineswegs, aber ich hätte es gern vertieft gelesen. - So ertappte ich mich gen Ende beim Querlesen, weil sich Muriel in jeder ihrer Eintragungen oder Briefe nur wiederholte und mich zu langweilen begann.
Was Roché indes wunderbar gelang, war die formelle Trennung Muriels und Claude. Ihre Mütter vereinbaren ein einjähriges Trennungsjahr, in dem sie sich nicht sehen und einander nicht schreiben dürfen. Dieses erlebt der Leser durch ihre Einträge im Tagebuch, in nebeneinanderliegenden Spalten. - Die restliche Handlung bleibt mir jedoch zu unvollendet durchdacht und unausgereift sowie eine Spur zu schwülstig.
September 10, 2016
Reviewed in 2004
Only in recent years has François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) emerged as a noteworthy film. A critical and financial disappointment when first released, its two-hour and twenty-minute running time was subsequently trimmed by nearly half an hour. Truffaut restored the cut footage in 1984, shortly before his untimely death from a brain tumor at the age of fifty-two.
Initially, the movie was seen as little more than a failed distaff variation on the director’s much-admired Jules and Jim (1962). Both films were based on autobiographical novels written in the 1950s by septuagenarian art collector Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959), famed as the go-between who introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1905.
There are superficial similarities shared by Roché’s two novels. Both concern romantic triangles. In Jules and Jim, a Frenchman and a German are in love with the same free-spirited woman during the era of the First World War. In Two English Girls and the Continent, set several years earlier at the turn of the century, two sensitive English sisters engage in a complicated love affair with a callow Frenchman.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy ménage à trois is unhappy in its own way. Roché’s respective threesomes are unique unto themselves, as are the narrative strategies he employs in each novel. Moreover, Truffaut himself significantly changed as a filmmaker in the decade that elapsed between the screen adaptations of the two books.
Jules and Jim was the director’s third feature, made when he was just turning thirty. Its success affirmed his growing stature as a key figure in the influential French New Wave film movement. A textbook of directing and editing ingenuity, Jules and Jim remains an exhilarating viewing experience. (A rare dissenter, critic Manny Farber, scorned Truffaut’s stylistic exuberance as “meaningless vivacity.”)
By 1971, the year Two English Girls appeared, the New Wave had lost its luster and cohesion. Once allies in shaking up the movie-making establishment, core New Wave members François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had taken divergent career paths, reflecting larger cultural schisms then coming to the fore in Western Europe and the United States.
Godard embraced radical politics and underground filmmaking. Truffaut aimed his efforts toward increasingly mainstream fare, racking up ambitious flops and audience-pleasing hits in equal measure. Unnoticed, or at least unappreciated, during this period was the degree to which Truffaut’s themes were moving in the direction of darker complexities.
Where Jules and Jim was nimble on its feet and wistful, Two English Girls is somber and brooding. Gone are the emblems of Truffaut’s youthful audacity—the jump cuts, the freeze frames, the athletic handheld camera shots. In retrospect, it’s clear that Two English Girls has more in common with several stark Truffaut films whose protagonists are neurotically hamstrung and obsessed, movies such as The Soft Skin (1964), The Story of Adele H. (1975), The Green Room (1978), and The Woman Next Door (1981).
Never as popular as the director’s light-as-air soufflés like Stolen Kisses (1968) and Day for Night (1973), these challenging lesser-known titles have grown in reputation and come to represent for some critics, like David Kehr, the pinnacle of Truffaut’s work. The consensus on Two English Girls has changed markedly over the years. It is now routinely referred to as “one of Truffaut’s greatest achievements.” This of course begs the question: How to account for the film’s tepid reception in 1971?
While far from reactionary in tone, the film refuses to satirize or gild with irony its story of three characters whose behaviors are circumscribed by sexual repression. Truffaut neither ridicules the society in which the story unfolds, nor does he suggest that romantic love is perennially a victim of generational or institutional tyranny. (Unlike, say, Ingmar Bergman’s more astringent Cries and Whispers—released the following year—which scores forceful moral points against the same repressive patriarchal epoch as Two English Girls.)
The film’s original audience was thus denied the kind of self-congratulatory counterculture critique so prevalent in the cinema of the 1970s. Instead, Two English Girls is a striking, if sometimes awkward, blend of fragile directorial restraint and surprisingly raw psychological intimacy. Perhaps out of sync with 1971, the film’s curious air of veiled hysteria seems more naturalistic than stilted today, and is perfectly suited—whether intentionally or not—to the nascent Freudianism of the story’s late nineteenth century milieu.
Nowhere is this felt stronger than the scene in which the character of Muriel (Stacey Tendeter) reveals with fetishistic severity her deep shame and religious guilt over being a compulsive masturbator since childhood. She directly faces the camera (and us) in a cold-eyed vérité monologue as she recounts explicit passages from her diary.
The faux documentary close-up accentuates Muriel’s punishing masochism. It also encapsulates the disillusionment of the film’s three central characters, Muriel, Anne, and Claude: the nearer they approach what they assume to be emotional truth, the deeper they are mired in paralysis and despair. Rather than an expression of emancipation or love, sexual passion in Truffaut’s Two English Girls is a death throe.
Roché’s novel, on the other hand, is less despairing than Truffaut’s often bleak adaptation. Not found in the book is the scene of aspiring art critic Claude (played with subdued grace by Truffaut’s familiar alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud) taking the cruel step of publishing Muriel’s unexpurgated diary in Paris. While in the novel Claude is humorously self-regarding in his untested love for Muriel and Anne, it is Truffaut who instills the character’s potential for betrayal.
More controversial is the film’s tubercular death meted out to Muriel’s sister Anne (Kika Markham), a character who is alive and well and married at the conclusion of the novel. Truffaut has said he was inspired to fuse the lives of Muriel and Anne with those of the Brontë sisters. Anne’s death in the film, he claimed, was meant to parallel Emily Brontë’s 1848 death from consumption.
Pauline Kael, in her 1972 review of the movie, suggested a more startling impulse behind Truffaut’s decision: Muriel and Anne had come to be painfully associated in the director’s mind with yet another pair of real-life sisters—the actresses Françoise Dorléac and Catherine Deneuve—with whom Truffaut had worked and with whom he had love affairs. Dorléac died in an automobile accident in 1967 at the age of twenty-five. Deneuve broke off a relationship with Truffaut in the fall of 1970.
The long-awaited biography Truffaut (1999), written by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, afforded a candid view of the director’s emotional state during the making of the film. Production began while Truffaut was under medical supervision, following his release from a psychiatric clinic where he was being treated for depression. (“The colors of my pills have become my only landscape,” he wrote to a friend at the time.) De Baecque and Toubiana contend that Two English Girls “can be read as the intimate journal of its convalescing director.”
Clearly, one’s admiration for the film ought not to be based solely on arcane knowledge of off-screen psychodramas surrounding the production. But consider this: it was François Truffaut who, as a film critic in the 1950s, coined the now familiar “auteur theory” with its proclamation that great movie directors bestow upon their work a distinctive and sacrosanct authorial voice. Is there any higher praise than to say that Truffaut’s melancholy soul haunts every frame of this strangely beguiling motion picture?
Only in recent years has François Truffaut’s Two English Girls (1971) emerged as a noteworthy film. A critical and financial disappointment when first released, its two-hour and twenty-minute running time was subsequently trimmed by nearly half an hour. Truffaut restored the cut footage in 1984, shortly before his untimely death from a brain tumor at the age of fifty-two.
Initially, the movie was seen as little more than a failed distaff variation on the director’s much-admired Jules and Jim (1962). Both films were based on autobiographical novels written in the 1950s by septuagenarian art collector Henri-Pierre Roché (1879-1959), famed as the go-between who introduced Gertrude Stein to Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1905.
There are superficial similarities shared by Roché’s two novels. Both concern romantic triangles. In Jules and Jim, a Frenchman and a German are in love with the same free-spirited woman during the era of the First World War. In Two English Girls and the Continent, set several years earlier at the turn of the century, two sensitive English sisters engage in a complicated love affair with a callow Frenchman.
To paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy ménage à trois is unhappy in its own way. Roché’s respective threesomes are unique unto themselves, as are the narrative strategies he employs in each novel. Moreover, Truffaut himself significantly changed as a filmmaker in the decade that elapsed between the screen adaptations of the two books.
Jules and Jim was the director’s third feature, made when he was just turning thirty. Its success affirmed his growing stature as a key figure in the influential French New Wave film movement. A textbook of directing and editing ingenuity, Jules and Jim remains an exhilarating viewing experience. (A rare dissenter, critic Manny Farber, scorned Truffaut’s stylistic exuberance as “meaningless vivacity.”)
By 1971, the year Two English Girls appeared, the New Wave had lost its luster and cohesion. Once allies in shaking up the movie-making establishment, core New Wave members François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard had taken divergent career paths, reflecting larger cultural schisms then coming to the fore in Western Europe and the United States.
Godard embraced radical politics and underground filmmaking. Truffaut aimed his efforts toward increasingly mainstream fare, racking up ambitious flops and audience-pleasing hits in equal measure. Unnoticed, or at least unappreciated, during this period was the degree to which Truffaut’s themes were moving in the direction of darker complexities.
Where Jules and Jim was nimble on its feet and wistful, Two English Girls is somber and brooding. Gone are the emblems of Truffaut’s youthful audacity—the jump cuts, the freeze frames, the athletic handheld camera shots. In retrospect, it’s clear that Two English Girls has more in common with several stark Truffaut films whose protagonists are neurotically hamstrung and obsessed, movies such as The Soft Skin (1964), The Story of Adele H. (1975), The Green Room (1978), and The Woman Next Door (1981).
Never as popular as the director’s light-as-air soufflés like Stolen Kisses (1968) and Day for Night (1973), these challenging lesser-known titles have grown in reputation and come to represent for some critics, like David Kehr, the pinnacle of Truffaut’s work. The consensus on Two English Girls has changed markedly over the years. It is now routinely referred to as “one of Truffaut’s greatest achievements.” This of course begs the question: How to account for the film’s tepid reception in 1971?
While far from reactionary in tone, the film refuses to satirize or gild with irony its story of three characters whose behaviors are circumscribed by sexual repression. Truffaut neither ridicules the society in which the story unfolds, nor does he suggest that romantic love is perennially a victim of generational or institutional tyranny. (Unlike, say, Ingmar Bergman’s more astringent Cries and Whispers—released the following year—which scores forceful moral points against the same repressive patriarchal epoch as Two English Girls.)
The film’s original audience was thus denied the kind of self-congratulatory counterculture critique so prevalent in the cinema of the 1970s. Instead, Two English Girls is a striking, if sometimes awkward, blend of fragile directorial restraint and surprisingly raw psychological intimacy. Perhaps out of sync with 1971, the film’s curious air of veiled hysteria seems more naturalistic than stilted today, and is perfectly suited—whether intentionally or not—to the nascent Freudianism of the story’s late nineteenth century milieu.
Nowhere is this felt stronger than the scene in which the character of Muriel (Stacey Tendeter) reveals with fetishistic severity her deep shame and religious guilt over being a compulsive masturbator since childhood. She directly faces the camera (and us) in a cold-eyed vérité monologue as she recounts explicit passages from her diary.
The faux documentary close-up accentuates Muriel’s punishing masochism. It also encapsulates the disillusionment of the film’s three central characters, Muriel, Anne, and Claude: the nearer they approach what they assume to be emotional truth, the deeper they are mired in paralysis and despair. Rather than an expression of emancipation or love, sexual passion in Truffaut’s Two English Girls is a death throe.
Roché’s novel, on the other hand, is less despairing than Truffaut’s often bleak adaptation. Not found in the book is the scene of aspiring art critic Claude (played with subdued grace by Truffaut’s familiar alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud) taking the cruel step of publishing Muriel’s unexpurgated diary in Paris. While in the novel Claude is humorously self-regarding in his untested love for Muriel and Anne, it is Truffaut who instills the character’s potential for betrayal.
More controversial is the film’s tubercular death meted out to Muriel’s sister Anne (Kika Markham), a character who is alive and well and married at the conclusion of the novel. Truffaut has said he was inspired to fuse the lives of Muriel and Anne with those of the Brontë sisters. Anne’s death in the film, he claimed, was meant to parallel Emily Brontë’s 1848 death from consumption.
Pauline Kael, in her 1972 review of the movie, suggested a more startling impulse behind Truffaut’s decision: Muriel and Anne had come to be painfully associated in the director’s mind with yet another pair of real-life sisters—the actresses Françoise Dorléac and Catherine Deneuve—with whom Truffaut had worked and with whom he had love affairs. Dorléac died in an automobile accident in 1967 at the age of twenty-five. Deneuve broke off a relationship with Truffaut in the fall of 1970.
The long-awaited biography Truffaut (1999), written by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana, afforded a candid view of the director’s emotional state during the making of the film. Production began while Truffaut was under medical supervision, following his release from a psychiatric clinic where he was being treated for depression. (“The colors of my pills have become my only landscape,” he wrote to a friend at the time.) De Baecque and Toubiana contend that Two English Girls “can be read as the intimate journal of its convalescing director.”
Clearly, one’s admiration for the film ought not to be based solely on arcane knowledge of off-screen psychodramas surrounding the production. But consider this: it was François Truffaut who, as a film critic in the 1950s, coined the now familiar “auteur theory” with its proclamation that great movie directors bestow upon their work a distinctive and sacrosanct authorial voice. Is there any higher praise than to say that Truffaut’s melancholy soul haunts every frame of this strangely beguiling motion picture?
July 4, 2009
Jean Pierre Roché no escribió su primer libro hasta los 74 años. 'Dos inglesas y el amor' es su segunda novela y, como la primera ('Jules y Jim') también parte de un hecho autobiográfico y también trata de un triángulo amoroso, en este caso el que se establece entre un joven (mimado) francés y dos hermanas inglesas. Pero también en cierto modo trata del triángulo que se establece entre amistad, amor y sexo, y como es muy difícil combinar estas tres variables al mismo tiempo y con una misma persona.
Estamos en 1899 y Claude está haciendo reposo, porque se fastidió los ligamientos precisamente haciendo alarde de la fuerza de sus rodillas, cuando conoce a Anne Brown, una chica inglesa que está pasando unos días en París. Claude enseña a Anne mejorar su francés y ella le enseña a él a mejorar su inglés. Anne dice a Claude que debe conocer a su hermana, Muriel, porque todo el mundo dice que es una chica maravillosa. Una vez recuperado, Claude va a Inglaterra para conocerla. Pero entonces es Muriel quién está convalescente por haberse fastidiado los ojos leyendo demasiado. Una vez recuperada, Muriel, Anne y Claude se empiezan a conocer e inevitablemente se hacen amigos.
Alguien le dice a Claude que se va a enamorar de Muriel. Él lo niega, remarca que él las quiere a las dos, tiene miedo que el amor acabe destruyendo la amistad, como al fin pasará. Y el principal problema es que Claude realmente las quiere a las dos y, a pesar de todo, o precisamente por esta razón, no puede quedarse con ninguna. Claude las quiere a las dos, pero los celos, la envidia, la entrega, el arrepentimiento, las dudas y el sacrificio se acaban infiltrando en el trío e imposibilitando la felicidad para todos. Sí, es una obra sobre amistad, amor y sexo, pero también una obra sobre personajes que descubren a otros pero también a sí mismos. Sí, es una obra sobre la búsqueda del amor, pero también sobre la búsqueda de la satisfacción intelectual. Es una obra que rebosa literatura, no sólo porque los personajes leen, se recomiendan libros y escriben, sino porque se nota que quién la ha escrito ha leído y ha amado mucha literatura.
Es un libro que tiene muchísimas escenas inolvidables, pero hay una que me encantó: un amigo de las hermanas Brown le pregunta a Claude qué ve en ellas, porque son dos jóvenes inglesas muy corrientes, y él se encoge de hombros. Lo mismo les pasa a ellas: Claude es el típico niño mimado francés. Y es que nuestros amigos no lo son porque tengan características extraordinarias sino porque con ellos hemos compartido una serie de experiencias que nos han marcado. Se trata de estar en el lugar adecuado en el momento adecuado. Lo mismo pasa con el amor. Aunque, en el caso del amor, los tres protagonistas nunca acabarán de encontrarse con la persona adecuada en el momento adecuado. Sus historias de amor no acabaran de funcionar nunca por cuestiones de desajustes horarios.
'Dos inglesas y el amor' está formada exclusivamente por los diarios y las cartas de los tres protagonistas, cosa que hace que ésta sea una obra extraodinariamente sincera e intimista. El estilo de Henri Pierre Roché es preciso y evocador. Es una novela preciosa. Es vitalista y a la vez melancólica. Es nostálgica y a la vez optimista. Es pura vida. Es auténtica literatura. Es una maravilla de libro.
Estamos en 1899 y Claude está haciendo reposo, porque se fastidió los ligamientos precisamente haciendo alarde de la fuerza de sus rodillas, cuando conoce a Anne Brown, una chica inglesa que está pasando unos días en París. Claude enseña a Anne mejorar su francés y ella le enseña a él a mejorar su inglés. Anne dice a Claude que debe conocer a su hermana, Muriel, porque todo el mundo dice que es una chica maravillosa. Una vez recuperado, Claude va a Inglaterra para conocerla. Pero entonces es Muriel quién está convalescente por haberse fastidiado los ojos leyendo demasiado. Una vez recuperada, Muriel, Anne y Claude se empiezan a conocer e inevitablemente se hacen amigos.
Alguien le dice a Claude que se va a enamorar de Muriel. Él lo niega, remarca que él las quiere a las dos, tiene miedo que el amor acabe destruyendo la amistad, como al fin pasará. Y el principal problema es que Claude realmente las quiere a las dos y, a pesar de todo, o precisamente por esta razón, no puede quedarse con ninguna. Claude las quiere a las dos, pero los celos, la envidia, la entrega, el arrepentimiento, las dudas y el sacrificio se acaban infiltrando en el trío e imposibilitando la felicidad para todos. Sí, es una obra sobre amistad, amor y sexo, pero también una obra sobre personajes que descubren a otros pero también a sí mismos. Sí, es una obra sobre la búsqueda del amor, pero también sobre la búsqueda de la satisfacción intelectual. Es una obra que rebosa literatura, no sólo porque los personajes leen, se recomiendan libros y escriben, sino porque se nota que quién la ha escrito ha leído y ha amado mucha literatura.
Es un libro que tiene muchísimas escenas inolvidables, pero hay una que me encantó: un amigo de las hermanas Brown le pregunta a Claude qué ve en ellas, porque son dos jóvenes inglesas muy corrientes, y él se encoge de hombros. Lo mismo les pasa a ellas: Claude es el típico niño mimado francés. Y es que nuestros amigos no lo son porque tengan características extraordinarias sino porque con ellos hemos compartido una serie de experiencias que nos han marcado. Se trata de estar en el lugar adecuado en el momento adecuado. Lo mismo pasa con el amor. Aunque, en el caso del amor, los tres protagonistas nunca acabarán de encontrarse con la persona adecuada en el momento adecuado. Sus historias de amor no acabaran de funcionar nunca por cuestiones de desajustes horarios.
'Dos inglesas y el amor' está formada exclusivamente por los diarios y las cartas de los tres protagonistas, cosa que hace que ésta sea una obra extraodinariamente sincera e intimista. El estilo de Henri Pierre Roché es preciso y evocador. Es una novela preciosa. Es vitalista y a la vez melancólica. Es nostálgica y a la vez optimista. Es pura vida. Es auténtica literatura. Es una maravilla de libro.
March 13, 2019
Il paragone con il celeberrimo "Jules et Jim" è quasi legittimato dal contesto, l'onnipresente triangolo amoroso, seppur qui in ambito più giovanile e forse per questo più lancinante e immediato. Tuttavia vi troviamo un Pierre-Roché più cupo e meno scorrevole, senza quel brio frizzantino tout-parisienne che ha reso il primo un'opera nota che se possibile la trasposizione di Truffaut ha persino superato.
April 27, 2021
Tres personajes se intercambian cartas. Dos inglesas: Anna, sentimental y artística; y Muriel, religiosa apasionada. Él, el continente: Claude, un franc��s liberado de ataduras morales, y creyente del amor total. La forma casi epistolar de la novela, unido al caracter solipsista de los personajes, deja una impresión de que la historia no acaba de evolucionar más allá del juego de claves de esa correspondencia (el no de Muriel, o el quizás, la separación, la confesión...). Como resultado, los personajes y la historia pierden fuerza al privarnos de los conflictos, evoluciones, cambios o transformaciones que toda fusión de elementos químicos acarrea. Y de forma parádojica en una novela demasiado masculina que no acaba de trascender su caracter autobiográfico, hay más fuerza en la pasión religiosa de Muriel, que en las relaciones libres de los amantes de la novela. Trabado el conflicto entre los sentimientos y caracteres de los protagonistas, las imágenes acaban sucumbiendo a un simbolismo pedestre de islas, remolinos, ríos y continentes y, salvo algunas imágenes de gran brillo y gestos casi silenciosos, hay tonos muy afectados pintándonos con esa paleta un cuadro de un bucolismo ramplón.
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September 26, 2022Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel “Two English Girls and the Continent” is more ambitious and collage-like than his earlier “Jules and Jim,” and its fragmented structure – comprising diaries, ruminations, and a multitude of letters – adds to its intricacy while hindering the real emotional connection that the very best epistolary fictions can create for the reader. I’ve read the earlier book more than once, but I don’t think I’ll return to this one any time soon. Then again, Truffaut was passionate about both of them, and he had pretty excellent taste, much of the time at least. For me, these are good literature, not great literature. Which is no small achievement, to be sure.
July 5, 2025
Desordenado, inteligente y cursi.
Me ha recordado mucho a D. H. Lawrence y sus Mujeres enamoradas.
Demasiado moderno incluso para este siglo.
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"Amor, amor. Se han soltado los perros y galopan en mi corazón".
Me ha recordado mucho a D. H. Lawrence y sus Mujeres enamoradas.
Demasiado moderno incluso para este siglo.
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"Amor, amor. Se han soltado los perros y galopan en mi corazón".
January 24, 2019
Neočekivan kraj!
January 27, 2022
me regale este libro por mi cumple y despues de ver la peli de Truffaut me gusto mucho mas es una forma de decir el amor lo es todo y es una m...
May 15, 2024
eterno oscillamento tra Muriel e Anne
May 17, 2024
Una obra de arte, no extraña que Truffaut le saca una película maravillosa
June 30, 2025
No es el amor lo que perturba la vida, sino la incertidumbre del amor.
July 25, 2025
Una obra de arte,no extraña que Truffaut le saca una maravillosa
August 23, 2023
Se Jules e Jim è la storia di due amici che amano le stesse donne, Le due inglesi e il continente è quella di due sorelle che si innamorano dello stesso uomo. Innumerevoli sono le varianti che questi amori incontrano, in un arco di trent’anni. Con la sua leggerezza lievemente maniacale, con la sua «penna d’acciaio freddo e acuto» (Truffaut) ancora una volta Roché osserva il cuore, il suo continuo «gioco dei tre cantoni», dove i personaggi tanto più imbrogliano se stessi quanto più pretendono di dominare gli eventi. Roché parla, al tempo stesso, come un eterno «curioso» dall’aria svagata – e come un severo maestro del Grand Siècle, che conosce e accarezza le molle segrete delle passioni. Qui «l’emozione nasce dal vuoto, da tutte le parole rifiutate, dall’ellissi stessa», ha scritto Truffaut, che da questo libro trasse nel 1971 uno dei suoi film più belli. Un’aria di estrema giovinezza, di freschezza, di felice incoscienza si respira in queste pagine. Ma, se osserviamo la superficie, vibrante e spumosa, da una certa distanza, ci accorgiamo che questa «educazione sentimentale romantica e di una purezza perversa» si svolge nel segno di una crudele meccanica dei sentimenti. Le «due inglesi», fra le cui braccia oscilla, con titubanza libertina, il giovane Claude, sono in verità una sola potenza, perennemente sdoppiata, che amministra la morte non meno dell’amore, anche se con la compitezza delle fanciulle dai nobili sentimenti.
December 8, 2009
took me a while to warm up to this one, started reading it as i was more interested in the film by truffaut (still need to watch it). took me so long to warm up to it because of the way he used mulitple pov's via diaries and letters. was most sucked in at the unrequited love tension towards the end, and then i lost my interest but stuck with it to the end.
March 7, 2020
"I genitori dovrebbero mettere alla porta i figli quando questi hanno vent' anni e non chiedere loro di fargli compagnia." dal diario di Muriel del 1903
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