2 h 28 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
How do you love when everything you love is passing?
In Marcel Schwob’s The Book of Monelle, a young girl speaks in strange, tender sayings that stay with the man who loves her. Part fable, part prose poem, part sermon, this short work of French Symbolist prose follows no straight path. It asks how anyone can live fully when love and time refuse to stand still.
Monelle’s spoken teachings give way to separate tales of other girls, each with her own nature and desires. Her words call for life in the present and the destruction of fixed ideas. Across these encounters, love takes different forms, while absence gives the book its haunted mood. For the man who remembers Monelle, her sayings keep changing their meaning.
What you’ll discover
- The present moment Meet Monelle’s bold claim that only the present is real, spoken with a child’s plainness.
- What must fall away Explore a call to break the old laws, customs, and ideas that trap the living.
- Love’s many faces Encounter girls whose separate tales give fleeting love different shapes and desires.
- Memory as a teacher Follow the words a man carries, and feel how absence changes their meaning.
- Between fable and poem Enter dreamlike scenes where tender sayings matter more than a fast, clear plot.
Who will love it
You will love this book if you enjoy fairy tales with a dark edge, short stories you can read in one sitting, and poetry that speaks in images of lamps, mirrors and rain.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Pity comes once out of the night
- Destroy everything so that you can begin
- Little girls play at cruelty and death
- Girls who set out toward another country
- Dreamers, mirrors and the cost of waiting
- Monelle is found, loved and lost again
- A white kingdom hidden inside the black one
Who’s who
- MonelleA girl who comes out of the night to speak, play and teach, and who keeps slipping away.
- MadgeA pale girl at a windmill who loves dark fancies and teases a beggar with talk of drowning.
- BargetteA lock keeper's daughter who boards a coal barge to find the sunny country her father described.
- JeanieA simple country girl who walks to a seaport to find her sailor lover.
- IlséeA girl who greets her reflection every morning and grows jealous of it when she falls in love.
- MarjolaineA dreamer who fills seven old pitchers with the wonders of her father's stories and refuses to marry.
- MorganeA cold princess who loves no one and travels westward in search of a true mirror.
- LillyA farmhand who walks across the world to find the herb of Queen Mandosiane and heal her friend Nan.
Formats and delivery
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- Large-print eBook
- The same book in bigger, clearer type, from the first page.
- Audiobook
- 2 h 28 min, complete, read by Lucas Linden.
- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas in about 6 minutes, to read or to hear.
- Paperback
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Hardcover
- 6 × 9 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print paperback
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
- Large print hardcover
- 8.5 × 11 in. Printing soon: leave your email under Paperback or Hardcover above.
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Read and hear Das Buch von Monelle in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Das Buch von Monelle
by Marcel Schwob · 1894
A girl with a burning torch tells you to destroy everything, forget her, and love each moment once.
Easy read2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
What if the one you love can only be kept by letting her go? In The Book of Monelle, the French writer Marcel Schwob follows a girl who steps out of the night, speaks to a lone wanderer, and slips away again.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Pity comes once out of the night
The book opens on a plain, where Monelle takes the writer by the hand. She says she is herself and not herself, that he will find her and lose her, and that few have seen her and none has understood her. First she tells him about the little prostitutes.
The young Bonaparte takes a nameless girl to his hotel room. Anne brings a glass of sweet wine to Thomas De Quincey as he stumbles along Oxford Street. Nelly gazes at Dostoevsky, and Sonia kisses Raskolnikov after his confession. Each one offers pity to a man in pain, then goes back into the dark, and nobody learns what became of her.
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What is The Book of Monelle about?
It is about a girl named Monelle who appears to a lone writer, teaches him to love the passing moment, and vanishes. Short tales of girls who play, dream and leave surround her teaching.
Who is Monelle?
Monelle is a figure in many forms: a speaker on a plain, a girl who leads children in play, a seamstress who leaves, a sleeper, and a leader. She says she has all names.
What does Monelle mean by destroy?
She means to break old forms, habits, memories and gods so that new ones can grow. Nothing should be kept, passed on or built to last, and every moment should be met fresh.
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