A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:

Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:


support the site

the complete review - fiction

The Closed Garden
(Adrienne Mesurat)

by
Julien Green

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

A- : effectively detailed and overwrought

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Wirklich ist der Roman dem Naturalismus niemals ferner gewesen als in diesem Werk. (...) Greens Abstand von dem üblichen Typus des Romanciers ist in der Kluft zwischen Vergegenwärtigung und Schilderung einbegriffen. Green schildert die Menschen nicht, er vergegenwärtigt sie in schicksalhaften Momenten. (...) Adrienne Mesurat gehört gleich Stendhals Romanen einer Gattung von Werken an, deren Aktualität im Zeitpunkt ihres Erscheinens latent ist, so daß kaum einer sich ihrer versieht, und erst im Licht des Nachruhms erkennbar wird, wodurch sie das Innerste ihrer Epoche bekunden." - Walter Benjamin, Internationale Revue
  
  
• "Ah, to be young, beautiful, wealthy and living in the French countryside ... take it from Adrienne, it's hell. (...) Green was only 26 when he wrote the book, and some of his descriptions are themselves rather callow (...) On the other hand, the unremitting detailing of the Villa's stultifying routine is very effective" - Publishers Weekly
  
  
• "It is an extremely fine piece of work, though I fancy that Mr. Green could have told it at half the length without any loss." - Ralph Straus, Sunday Times
  
  
• "A French reader, gazing on them, feels as if he had looked in his looking-glass and seen there a face not his own. None the less, these terrible Mesurats are human beings, passionately interesting, and we follow their fortunes spellbound. Odious as they are (...) they compel our attention, for M. Julien Green has already acquired the art of a fine novelist: he goes his own way, at his own pace, and we follow him." - Mary Duclaux, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Green zeichnet die Figur mit einer Genauigkeit, die keinen Schweißtropfen, keine fahrige Bewegung und keinen Blick aus dem Fenster ausläßt. Ohne diese Überschärfe würden sich Adriennes Verwirrungen, wie diejenigen Wilfreds, in Rhetorik und Gefühlsschlamm auflösen. (...) Viele Leute, die das Buch aus der Hand legen, fühlen sich noch über Stunden hinweg verstört." - Hans Platschek, Die Zeit
  
  
• "Green verabscheute die Psychoanalyse, er wollte dem Wahnsinn seine Majestät nicht rauben und gab sich mit noch so behutsamen Versuchen, Adriennes Wahnsinn verständlich zu machen, nicht ab. Wahnsinn ist das Leben, zu dem die verkümmerte Adrienne erwacht, Wahnsinn schläft unter der dünnen grauen Decke provinzieller Gewohnheiten. Wie das "irre Mädchen" auf dem Gemälde von Füßli, das ein Künstler à la Max Ernst ausgeschnitten und in den Stahlstich eines Salons geklebt hat, schaut Adrienne mit durchbohrendem Blick durch den Leser hindurch. Phädras Verzweiflung und das schauerlichste Grand-Guignol bilden die Mischung dieser eigentümlich parodistischen Kolportage, die Greens Ruhm begründete." - Martin Mosebuch, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       The Closed Garden, now published under its original French title (and the name of its central figure), Adrienne Mesurat, is set in small-town La Tour de l'Evêque, in 1908. Eighteen-year-old Adrienne Mesurat lives in the so-called Villa des Charmes in the blandest of bourgeois comfort with her sixty-year-old retired father, a man of the most basic routines, and her long-ailing sister, Germaine, seventeen years her senior; their mother passed away fifteen years earlier and Germaine had taken on a role closer to mother than sister (though without the energy to make much of an impression in either). The Mesurats have essentially no social circle, close neither to family nor any outsiders, and live the dullest of lives. Sickly Germaine spends all her time listlessly aswoon, while old Mesurat sticks to a simple, satisfying routine; the novel opens with Adrienne with duster in hand, bored silly.
       This is an almost claustrophobically domestic novel, the Villa des Charmes a hold -- in father Mesurat's controlling hands -- that has tightened around the two women and which Adrienne, in particular, now feels increasingly constricting. It is a functioning household, to all appearances, but the adults are blind to anything beyond their most limited, self-absorbed purviews, and Adrienne, so used to this: "tyranny of custom", barely able to imagine anything beyond. It is a triste locale -- and even before Mesurat really clamps down and isolates them further the description rings true:

Nothing can be imagined more dismal than this garden, half hidden by the dusk, sodden and streaming.

Adrienne always waited in the parlor until lunch was served, and passed the time as best she might. Often, as before, she put on an apron above her black serge dress and wiped the furniture, over which she felt quite sure Desirée's duster never passed. Or else she amused herself by taking the books out of their shelves, brushing their backs with a clothes brush, and putting them back in order of size. It never occurred to her to read one.

     "Adrienne," said Germaine, so steadily as to surprise her younger sister, "I have made up my mind to leave this house."
     "Leave this house ? What an idea !"
     "I have no intention of discussing it with you," replied Germaine in a harsh and uneven voice. "Yu must see that I can't go on living here at my age, under the control of a man who will not even allow me to stay in bed when I like when it is necessary. Besides, the climate here is execrable. Look how cold it is this morning, after all these roasting days. It is enough to kill anyone. What I need is warmth and sunshine and an even temperature. And I must be free. Papa is growing terribly old. He is a tyrant -- yes, a tyrant !

     "You are highly nervous, mademoiselle. You are falling, little by little, into a state of despondency from which you may never be cured if you do not make an immediate effort. You must see more people; above all, trust in others more than you do. There are many things in you that have no right to be there, and which the sole fact that you brood upon them renders acute. You have certain thoughts shut up within yourself that have ended by acting on you as poison."

Everything she was doing now -- these familiar gestures, which she was repeating once again -- afforded her a sort of animal joy, unreasoning enough, but which she could have explained in something like these words: "Things must be going on perfectly well. Nothing can have changed, since I am going to bed as usual, since I open my window -- chafe my shoulders." She blew out the lamp and dived between the sheets.

- M.A.Orthofer, 4 May 2019

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

• Holmes & Meier publicity page
• Le Livre de Poche publicity page

• Chroniques d'une rêveuse à lunettes (French)
• Duecento Pagine (Italian)
• Internationale Revue (German)
• Lecture/Ecriture (French)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• L'Orient Littéraire (French)
• piensacontracorriente (Spanish)
• Publishers Weekly
• Die Welt (German)
• Die Zeit (German)

• Julien Green at books and writers

• The Dixie trilogy:
  1. The Distant Lands
  2. The Stars of the South

• See Index of French literature
• See Index of Books Written Between 1900 and 1945

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

       French-writing American author Julien (also: Julian) Green lived 1900 to 1998.

- Return to top of the page -

© 2019-2021 the complete review

Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links