Julien Gracq

The narrator of this story, Aldo, a world-weary young aristocrat, is posted to the coast of Syrtes, where the Admiralty keeps the seas constantly patrolled to defend the demarcation between two powers still officially at war. This book won the Prix Goncourt.

The Opposing Shore

A Balcony in the Forest

A Dark Stranger

It is the fall of 1939, and Lieutenant Grange and his men are living in a chalet above a concrete bunker deep in the Ardennes forest, charged with defending the French-Belgian border against the Germans in a war that seems unreal, distant, and unlikely. Far more immediate is the earthy life of the forest itself and the deep sensations of childhood it recalls from Grange?s memory. Ostensibly readying for war, Grange instead spends his time observing the change in seasons, falling in love with a young free-spirited widow named Mona, and contemplating the absurd stasis of his present condition. This novel of long takes, dream states, and little dramatic action culminates abruptly in battle, an event that is as much the real incursion of the German army into France as it is the sudden intrusion of death into the suspended disbelief of life. Richard Howard?s skilled translation captures the fairy-tale delicacy and existential dread of this unusual, elusive novel (first published in 1959) by the supreme prose stylist Julian Gracq.Story Locale-France and Belgium

Balcony in the Forest

The Shape Of A City

Le rivage des Syrtes

In fluid prose, Julien Gracq navigates-in memory-the magical Evre and the terrain through which it coursed in his youth. "The Narrow Waters" is a synaptic meditation on Begining and Ending whose inquiries and visions flow, and sometimes cascade,

The Narrow Waters

Written in 1938, Chateau D'Argol was Julien Gracq's literary debut and was heralded by Andre Breton as the first truly Surrealist novel. From Gracq's point of view, however, it was a departure from a movement he had never really joined in the first place. Although he maintained his admiration for Breton and the Surrealist project, in Chateau D'Argol he cut away from that style with an idiosyncratic blend of linear storytelling and poetic excursions. The novel is a disturbing love story whose themes -- yearning, the magnetism of mutual attraction, and the impossibility of amorous fulfillment, crystallized in the depiction of a potential lover as an inaccessible Other -- are irresistible.

Château D'Argol

Au château d'Argol est le premier roman de Julien Gracq, le premier roman surréaliste tel qu'André Breton le rêvait. Les sens irrigués par les lieux et les espaces sont l'image la plus exacte des relations entre les êtres, Albert le maître d'Argol, Herminien son ami, son complice, son ange noir, et Heide, la femme. Tout autour, sombre, impénétrable, la forêt. Tout près, l'océan.

Au château d'Argol

La Presqu'île

Sirte kıyısı

A Costa das Sirtes

Chateau D'Argol

Nantes, city of Breton and Rimbaud, is reconstructed from a memory based on Gracq's childhood lycee.

The Shape of a City

The narrator of King Cophetua, a former soldier, recalls the events surrounding his arrival at the home of his friend Jacques Nueil, a dandy, an aviator, and an avant-garde composer. It is All Saints' Day, 1917. The Great War is leading up to images of the Russian Revolution, and from Nueil's villa the narrator hears the sounds of bombs dropping in the distance. King Cophetua is inspired by vivid memory and by two images, Goya's engraving entitled La Mala Noche and Burne-Jones's painting King Cophetua and the Beggar Girl.

Julien Gracq

About

Books

Join the club