Episode Details

Lately, I’m trying to know summer constellations by heart, and not the real stars but the ones that twinkle in my imagination. Two novellas, one of 47K words and one of just seventeen with the author’s drawings.

These novellas have the right length to be read aloud. In my twenties, I did it with small audiences, and I was always reading certain common nuances, especially the fact I could feel as if I were talking to a distant woman.

So, over the years, I read about authors who cannot be disassociated from their partners. They were very insecure individuals who never thought they were still revered beyond their wildest dreams, and their life partners are remembered as tinder in these written homages.

The Little Prince, The Great Gatsby, and Le Grand Meaulnes. Antoine Saint-Exupèry, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and Henri Alain-Fournier. These are the brightest stars of the Coming Age Constellation.

Someone would say I’m leaving JD Salinger on purpose, but he wasn’t in love with adult people but in rage for unrequited love. Charles Chaplin stole his sweetheart while serving in World War II. And that was backstabbing.

The Little Prince was written in America to soothe Consuelo’s jealousy, wife of an aristocrat and aviator who enjoyed flying at night over the sea carrying mail between countries of the late French Empire. Try to imagine a Count as the bold mailman, the Nazis shot him down over the Mediterranean.

The Great Gatsby is the Great American Novel. A self-made man squanders his fortune of dubious origins to rewrite his romantic past and he finds a way to meet again with the lost flame of his youth. But he miserably fails because he is out of his depth. And, the author manages to write it down while his Southern belle is partying and flirting with a French aviator, an affair that went in disguise into the novel.

Le Gran Meaulnes has the cult of Jay Gatsby, and the childhood bliss of that blondie lost in the desert. I leave it as a closing of Saint-Exupéry as much of Scott Fitzgerald read and stole from this novella where a particular child becomes a wondrous beauty, Ivonne. Still ”le passé peut-il renaître?” Which is in Nick Carraway’s words to Gatsby “You can not repeat the past”

“Can not repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”