Olivier is jealous and ends up in the hands of the cynical and downright diabolical Comte de Passavant, who travels with him to the Mediterranean.Įventually, Bernard and Édouard decide they do not fit as well together as anticipated, and Bernard leaves to take a job at a school, then finally decides to return to his father's home. After Bernard steals the suitcase belonging to Édouard, Olivier's uncle, and the ensuing complications, he is made Édouard's secretary. He spends a night in Olivier's bed (where Olivier describes a recent visit to a prostitute and how he did not find the experience very enjoyable). The plot revolves around Bernard – a schoolfriend of Olivier's who is preparing for his bac – discovering he is a bastard and taking this as a welcome pretext for running away from home. The making of the novel, with letters, newspaper clippings and other supporting material, was documented by Gide in his 1927 Journal of The Counterfeiters. Initially received coldly on its appearance, perhaps because of its homosexual themes and its unusual composition, The Counterfeiters has gained reputation in the intervening years and is now generally counted among the Western canon of literature. An important part of the plot is its depiction of various possibilities of positive and negative homoerotic or homosexual relationships. The novel features a considerable number of bisexual or gay male characters – the adolescent Olivier and at least to a certain unacknowledged degree his friend Bernard, in all likelihood their schoolfellows Gontran and Philippe, and finally the adult writers the Comte de Passavant (who represents an evil and corrupting force) and the (more benevolent) Édouard. The structure of the novel was written to mirror ' Cubism', in that it interweaves between several different plots and portrays multiple points of view. Therefore, the book has been seen as a precursor of the nouveau roman. Other stylistic devices are also used, such as an omniscient narrator who sometimes addresses the reader directly, weighs in on the characters' motivations or discusses alternate realities. The Counterfeiters is a novel-within-a-novel, with Édouard (the alter ego of Gide) intending to write a book of the same title. With many characters and crisscrossing plotlines, its main theme is that of the original and the copy, and what differentiates them – both in the external plot of the counterfeit gold coins and in the portrayal of the characters' feelings and their relationships. The Counterfeiters ( French: Les Faux-monnayeurs) is a 1925 novel by French author André Gide, first published in Nouvelle Revue Française.

Les Faux-monnayeurs by André Gide