...In the way that J.D. Salinger was able to maintain the voice of 13 year old Holden Caulfield throughout Catcher in the Rye, so Fournier gives his narrator a younger teenage persona, albeit a perceptive and intelligent one. Fournier was always looking back, and I think he was already setting his recent experiences with Yvonne de Quiévrecourt in the poetic past, the narrator given a naïve outlook, an innocence and an unworldliness that Alain-Fournier's real life disavows. The poems are powerful and effective given this distancing, and free-floating in some ideal place and time. Despite the powerful outpouring of spontaneous feelings and the symbolism attached to certain objects in the poems (the chateau, the parasol, the path, the garden, etc) they are not Romantic in the German or English sense of the word. The poems owe something to the dreamy sense of fantasy attached to French Symbolism, but perhaps ultimately they are shaped more by impressionism and the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty than by the standard preoccupations of 19th century European poetry...
