Château D'Argol

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.