Alyssa Cohen’s Reviews > Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand > Status Update

“Even as I write, this theory is still being discussed…According to it, the novel is a work of poetry as much as analysis. Authentic, even real, characters and situations are required, ranged about a figure who must exemplify the chief feeling or idea of the book. This figure usually represents passionate love, for almost all novels are love stories…Is this theory valid?” (Chapter Eleven)

“She declared that they [her childhood compositions] were terribly dull because of their length and the scope I gave to digressions. This is a fault I’ve retained, I’m told; for my part, I confess that I’m almost unaware of what I do, and that I have today the same irrepressible abandon in such storytelling that I had when I was four” (Chapter One).

“Not to work so that my eyes would sparkle; not to run and play in the sun when God’s good sun attracts me so; […] to doom myself to be clumsy and feeble; never to tire myself, when everything urges me to use up my energy; to live, in short, under a bell jar; to be neither burned, nor chapped, nor faded before my time—such things were always impossible for me” (Chapter One).

Well the one I’m reading is “translated and adapted by Dan Hofstadter.”