2 h 28 minAudiobook4 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
For readers who love poetic, dreamlike writing, French Symbolism and the late nineteenth century, and anyone who enjoys short books about love and time.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Live inside the present moment
- Destroy what has hardened around you
- Love comes in many fleeting forms
- Loss turns memory into a teacher
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- Large print hardcover
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Le Livre de Monelle
by Marcel Schwob · 1894
Monelle’s tender sayings ask a man who loves her how to live when everything is passing.
Easy read2–5 hours to read25 languages
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In short
The Book of Monelle is a short work of French Symbolist prose by Marcel Schwob, first published in 1894. It is part fable, part prose poem, part sermon.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Live inside the present moment
The book's first and strongest claim is that only the present is real. Monelle speaks as a child speaks, plainly and without fear, yet her words carry a kind of prophecy. For her, the past is already gone and the future is not yet here. What a person has is now, and now does not wait.
This idea shapes the whole book. A life built on memory or on plans is a life lived away from itself. Schwob suggests that we cling to old versions of ourselves and to hopes that never come, and that this clinging dulls us. Monelle does not argue the point like a philosopher. She states it, and the strangeness of her voice lets the idea strike harder.
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What is The Book of Monelle about?
It is a short Symbolist fable about a man who loves a young girl named Monelle and carries her sayings with him. Its themes are the present moment, the end of fixed things, and the changing nature of love.
Who was Marcel Schwob?
Schwob was a French writer, critic and translator who died in 1905. He was admired for short, strange, learned fiction and is also known for Imaginary Lives, a book of invented short biographies.
When was The Book of Monelle written?
It was first published in 1894, in the Symbolist period of French literature. It is a work of imagination, a fable and prose poem, not a true story or a memoir.
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