The Counterfeiters · Journal
Édouard's Journal
also known as The Counterfeiters (the novel within)
Édouard
A novelist's notebook about the novel he is writing, which has the same title as the novel you are reading — Gide's cubist joke, and still the cleanest machine for watching a book invent itself.
Iris Chase published a novel under her sister’s name. Gide published a novel under his character’s working title, and then published the journal of writing it under his own.
Édouard’s notes are the workshop. You watch him fail to decide whether Bernard is a character or a boy, whether the counterfeit coins are the subject or a coincidence, whether a novel should include the journal of its own making. Gide decided it should. The result is not a trick so much as a honesty: The Counterfeiters you can buy is the only finished version. Édouard’s remains in progress on purpose, which is the only way a book about counterfeits could end without lying.
Morelli leaves out the lines that count. Édouard puts in the lines about putting in the lines. Both men are Cortázar’s and Gide’s way of refusing the lector who wants to be fed. The catalogue takes their side.
On the readability rating. Substantial journal, printed. The inner novel, as a closed object, is not. Gide’s own Journal des Faux-monnayeurs is in the shops and is not Édouard’s. Adjacent. Not identical.
In-world history
Édouard, uncle, novelist, lover of Olivier, moves through a Paris of schoolboys, counterfeit gold, and fake feeling. He is writing Les Faux-monnayeurs. Gide, who kept a journal of writing Les Faux-monnayeurs and published that too, puts Édouard's notes in the novel: characters discussed as if they were not yet people, a method declared, a book that will not sit still long enough to close. The counterfeit coins are the other plot. They are not a metaphor. They are the other plot.
Why it matters
Calvino will withhold the rest of every book. Gide withholds nothing except the finished inner novel, and gives you instead the mess of intending it. Édouard's journal is Morelli before Morelli, without the hopscotch.
Appearances
- The Counterfeiters (1926) — André Gide Les Faux-monnayeurs; Édouard is writing a novel called The Counterfeiters, and keeping a journal about writing it, which Gide prints
Connected volumes
- Related to Morelli's Novel · Hopscotch
- Related to If on a winter's night a traveler · The Fictions of Calvino
- Related to The Golden Notebook · The Golden Notebook
Catalogue record
- Category
- Journal
- World
- The Counterfeiters
- Imagined by
- André Gide
- Language
- French
- First appearance
- Les Faux-monnayeurs (Gallimard, 1926)
- Readability
- Extensive excerpts
Sources
- André Gide, Les Faux-monnayeurs (Gallimard, 1926). English translation by Dorothy Bussy, The Counterfeiters (Knopf, 1927). Gide's Journal des Faux-monnayeurs (1926) is the real notebook standing next to Édouard's.
Added by house · last checked 2026-09-06