September is my favorite month for several reasons. Once the haze dissipates, the crowds that come with summer in a beach town also disappear, especially now that social networks have attracted swarms of people to remote places. It is also a time for farewells to summer romances, a theme often found in coming-of-age novels. The posh urban girl promises to keep in touch with the besotted villager but ultimately doesn't, as the intense passion often fades with the return to daily life.
I'm fortunate enough to sleep in front of a folding window. Until the cold arrives, I open it wide so I can look at the Moon and constellations rising from the east behind a pine grove. This killing view often motivates to get up early before the sun comes up and blinds me completely if I am a slacker. Just yesterday, I witnessed a fabulous aurora where Sirius rose–the Dog Star–twinkling madly with flashes of red and blue. Above, the constellation of the hunter Orion was drawing his bow.
These are the constellations of the end of summer that I know by heart. They are like the brilliant coming-of-age novels that flicker in my imagination. I will proceed to name them as distant stars, pointing to the beautiful women who inspired them and to the brilliant authors who sang them to grace them with the kiss of eternity. And the communicating vessels that all these works have.
They are nothing more than short novels, also known as novellas, far from the canon of the twelve hundred thousand words of the classic novel. Even the brightest among them is so short that it can be read aloud in an afternoon, something I used to do when I was young for anyone who had the patience to listen to me.
Back in the day, I was quite forward-thinking. Nowadays, most young people don't seem to read more than a paragraph, nor do they understand the experience of staying up all night immersed in a book, like my turn-of-the-century generation did on the brink of the Digital Revolution. For the contemporary illiterate, stories are only experienced through spoken word, like oral literature at its finest. Who would have ever imagined this?
November by Gustave Flaubert is considered one of his most sensual works, portraying a time when sexual initiation was often guided by anonymous prostitutes who served as priestesses of pleasure. The story is narrated in the first person, allowing the reader to empathize with a young man burdened by romantic imagination and prematurely disappointed, possibly stemming from intense anxiety, a common experience for teenagers overwhelmed by the weight of the world. The protagonist's inability to see beyond his own concerns is likened to someone fixated on their own problems and unable to see the bigger picture. Although there is no historical record of the anonymous pleasure priestess, it is known that Flaubert was a utter whoremonger, ultimately succumbing to syphilis and sporting black teeth, hence his characteristic walrus mustache.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was written in America to alleviate Consuelo’s jealousy. She was the wife of an aristocrat and aviator who enjoyed flying at night over the sea to deliver mail between countries of the late French Empire. It's quite extraordinary to imagine a French Count as a bold mailman. He was shot down by the Nazis over the Mediterranean.
The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald is often considered the Great American Novel. A self-made man squanders his fortune of dubious origin to rewrite his romantic past and finds a way to meet again with the lost flame of his youth. But he miserably fails because he is out of his depth. During this time, the author's wife, Zelda, his Southern belle was partying and flirting with a French aviator, an affair that went subtly in disguise in the novel.
In closing, Le Grand Meaulnes –sometimes translated to English as The Lost Domain– by Alain-Fournier was the character of Jay Gatsby still in his embryonic stage, and also the childhood bliss of that blondie lost in the desert. I guess both de Saint-Exupéry and Scott Fitzgerald read and also committed art theft 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!”
Someone might say I am intentionally leaving apart The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger unattended. Yes, of course, he is the rising Dog Star.
Charles Chaplin stole his sweetheart, Oona, the underage daughter of the American playwright Eugene O’Neill, while Salinger was serving in World War II. It was a sheer backstabbing and also a famous scandal because the 36-year gap between them further fueled the controversy. Salinger must have experienced immense emotional turmoil. It's difficult to fathom the profound impact these events had on him and how they influenced the writing of his iconic coming-of-age novel. The book, a war novel without war or heroes, delves the struggles of troubled teenagers. Salinger penned this masterpiece while enduring the tumultuous Normandy landings, believing he might perish frozen in a foxhole during the Battle of the Bulge and confronting the horrors of Dachau, where the stench of burning flesh permanently scarred him.