#marshlands

Sunset over the mountains - Iceland, March 2024

Photo by: nature-hiking

I had hoped I would enjoy this one, since I'm generally up for metafictional mind games -- Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is among my favorite books -- but despite its brevity, I'm finding it a tough go. The unnamed author, whom Gide presumably meant as a parody of himself and his social circle, is deeply unlikeable, and the whole thing feels like an elaborate in-joke that you had to have been a fin de siècle Parisian to get.

In fairness to Gide, parody is tricky. If your subject matter is highly topical, it's likely that any spoof won't age well, since later audiences won't be familiar with what you're spoofing. That said, it can be done. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons parodies 1920s and '30s rural English potboilers, a genre now all but forgotten, but does so in such brilliant fashion that it's long outlived its source material. The same can't be said of Marshlands, alas.

the breaking of twigs