The Other Landscape

THE WANDERER (306 pp.) -- Henri Alain-Fournier, translated by Franc,oise Delisle--New Directions ($1.50).

This minor masterpiece, by a young Frenchman killed in World War I, has gone into 80 editions in France (where it is called Le Grand Meaulnes). It is now after 18 years, reprinted in the "New Classics Series" published by New Directions. It is the story of a 17-year-old schoolboy to whom strange coincidence and his own imagination bring an experience of what Alain-Fournier called "the other mysterious landscape."

The boy, Meaulnes, playing hooky from school, gets lost in the countryside and takes shelter in an old manor which is full of boys & girls having a masquerade party. Amid the strange fantasy of this midwinter festival he sees and falls in love with a young girl of great beauty. But the party ends abruptly: he falls asleep in a carriage; set down in his own neighborhood, he never finds the way back to the manor, which might have been a dream.

The distinction of the novel is in the delicacy, forlorn but hard, with which Meaulnes' further adventures make clear that he has seen the magic of reality--and that the vision is unrecoverable. As a study of adolescent enchantment and disenchantment, The Wanderer is unique in fiction.

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