A literature course called Great Novellas beckoned me. I enrolled on it in order to discover writers or works I had not encountered before, and to sample fine writing I might learn from in order to improve my craft. This was one of the books on that course.

This is the story of a boy of 15 falling in love for the first time, as related by his middle-aged self. What can I say? The language is beautiful, but in my opinion hopelessly inappropriate. The protagonist is a teenage boy, and as I was once a teenage boy I have some experience here. I can honestly say that I never met anyone at that time who would even describe his feelings, let alone do so in such an overwrought manner.

The girl he falls in love with is an impoverished princess who is 21 going on 15. She has a bunch of suitors — aka hangers-on — all of whom drool over her and all of whom she twists around her little finger. Moreover, their characters are so under-developed that they are more or less interchangeable. At any rate, I can’t remember who was who or who did what, and I only read the book a couple of weeks ago.

I also found the denouement rather predictable. At least, I predicted it halfway through the book.

I also find the framing device rather tedious. A group of people (as far as I can tell always men) sit around and decide to tell a story. HG Wells does it in The Time Machine. Tolstoy does it in The Kreutzer Sonata. Why not just tell the story instead of creating a story within a story? I suppose it does, in theory, allow the narrator to finish off the narrative by saying something profound or reflective about the story we’ve just “heard”. Personally I wish the author would just get on with it.

For some reason, First Love is hailed as a great work, including by writers such as Ian McEwan and VS Pritchett, so I suppose I must be missing something. I think if you like Turgenev you might like this. But it was all too histrionic for my liking.