If It Die

Synopsis

"if it die" is a record of gide's childhood and early manhood, up until his engagement to his cousin. Written twenty years afterwards, it is a deliberately uninhibited and revealing exercise as well as a masterpiece of french prose, thus fulfilling the two criteria gide set himself - to satisfy the demands of truth without neglecting the claims of art. It was said that in gide 'les extrmes touchent', a predisposition that was to characterize all his work, and these antitheses are clearly acknowledged and used in his narrative in order to add extra layers of resonance and meaning.