Jean-Christophe

On a level with Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, this epic novel is the Nobel Laureate Romain Rolland’s crowning achievement.

Here, Romain Rolland chronicles the life of an artistic genius, in Tolstoyan depth and scope. Rolland gathers the whole thought of the nineteenth century to make the starting point for the hero’s leap into the twentieth.

Jean-Christophe Krafft, born, like Beethoven, to an alcoholic, exploitative father and a doting, chambermaid mother, is an exquisitely talented musician growing up in the German-occupied Rhineland. Splendidly capturing the development of Jean-Christophe’s personality and musical development alike, Rolland progressively follows his hero through the states of his life: his innocent but ultimately disillusioned boyhood; his escape from his provincial home; his travels to pre-World War I Paris; his friends, lovers, and pupils, as they enter, leave, and reappear in his life through the years; and his passionate search for his spiritual role as an artist, while censuring the decadent European civilization around him.

The novel’s form – and Jean-Christophe’s life – flows like a river, with vast shapelessness on the surface but an immense momentum towards its goal. Through a vivid portrait of his hero’s creative life, Rolland’s work is a deeply personal examination of art’s power to express moral truth and to combat disintegrating values.

Universally regarded as the first great work of fiction produced in the twentieth century, Jean-Christophe has a truly symphonic sweep, splendidly conveying the preludes, postludes, crescendo, and coda of a life fully lived.