Books like Le Grand Meaulnes

Dear Henri Alain-Fournier,Some people claim you had great talent as a novelist. Many more would claim I don't. Is it fair that you died in World War I while I live, free to write this review and feeling like I'm having a bad morning because I didn't have all the usual ingredients for my breakfast shake? Your remains weren't identified until 1991, true, but do you know that without yogurt, steel cut oatmeal, goji berries and banana congeal like pond scum when blended with almond milk? I guess in a way translated works of fiction are like that, lacking an ingredient. Not really fair of me to judge you then, is it? And on top of that, I read somewhere that the Robin Buss translation I have isn't the best.I don't know. Maybe I've been prejudiced against anything French because there's been a creepy mime wandering around the farmers' market on Saturdays. With the summer heat, its face make-up starts to melt and peel and it scares my kid and me. Or maybe, having discovered Woody Allen before James Dean, it's because I'm sentimental for my own sort of coming-of-age story. But the truth is, I found your novel sappy. Sappy to the nth degree. "And that evening, sobbing, he asked Mademoiselle de Galais for her hand in marriage."Barf.Some folks describe it as dream-like. Well, I'll meet them halfway and say that it is conducive to a dream-like state, in as much as I found myself wanting to fall asleep as I read it. God! Germany probably invaded France so often to keep from nodding off. Can you blame them? They had all those big philosophical treatises to write, but then kept getting distracted by the latest Twilight prequel. And they would've even read it in the original French because all you Continentals speak five languages! I tried to make excuses for you, thinking, "Look at it this way: it's a parable for post-colonial France. They were just coming off that Napoleonic high and had to simultaneously deal with the onset of modernity. It's a simple case of British/penis envy." But even my credulity can only stretch so far. Goodbye, Alain-Fournier. Sorry your life was cut short by one of history's celebrated mistakes. Maybe this book will mean something to somebody else. It's going to have the opportunity, because I'm donating it to my library.