Jean-Christophe

This is the one, though it is one that demands commitment. Jean-Christophe is ten volumes and roughly sixteen hundred pages in full, but the first volume alone is a complete, extraordinary piece of fiction.

Why Start Here

Jean-Christophe Krafft is a German musical prodigy born into poverty on the Rhine. From his childhood we watch him struggle against his limitations, his family, his society, and finally his own genius. The prose is musical in the most literal sense, it has rhythm, crescendo, and silence. Rolland understood music the way few novelists do, and it shows on every page.

Start with the first volume. It gives you Rolland’s sensibility, his scope, his warmth, and his fierce belief in the life of the spirit. If it takes hold of you, and it will, or it won’t, you’ll read the rest. Nothing else in Rolland matches the full cycle for ambition and humanity. It won him the Nobel Prize for good reason.

What to Expect

Dense, symphonic prose that rewards slow reading. The first volume is the most immediately accessible, a bildungsroman, essentially, about a difficult boy with an extraordinary gift. After that the novel expands across Germany, France, and Switzerland, and becomes more panoramic and philosophical. Go in ready to be absorbed.