Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate André Gide's Lafcadio's Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime. When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he's heir to an ailing French nobleman's fortune, he's seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio--one of the most original creations in all modern fiction--goes free.
Sobre o autor(a)
Gide, André
André Paul Guillaume Gide nasceu em Paris, em 1869, filho de representantes da alta burguesia. Foi o fundador da revista Nouvelle Revue Française, veículo que conquistou grande prestígio e influenciou várias gerações de literatos. Também fundou a Editora Gallimard, outro berço de talentos da época. Gide era homossexual assumido, e sua obra, com muitos aspectos autobiográficos, desafiava os intelectuais a debater os preconceitos e os conflitos morais e religiosos da sociedade. Recebeu o Nobel de Literatura em 1947 e morreu pouco tempo depois, em 1951. |