Julien Gracq – författare

With four elegant and beautifully crafted novels Julien Gracq has established himself as one of France's premier postwar novelists. A mysterious and retiring figure, Gracq characteristically refused the Goncourt, France's most distinguished literary prize, when it was awarded to him in 1951 for this book. As the latest work in the Twentieth-Century Continental Fiction Series, Gracq'a masterpiece is now available for the first time in English. Set in a fictitious Mediterranean port city, The Opposing Shore is the first-person account of a young aristocrat sent to observe the activities of a naval base. The fort lies at the country's border; at its feet is the bay of Syrtes. Across the bay is territory of the enemy who has, for three hundred years, been at war with the narrator's countrymen; the battle has become a complex, tacit game in which no actions are taken and no peace declared. As the narrator comes to understand, everything depends upon a boundary, unseen but certain, separating the two sides.Besides the narrator there are two other main characters, the dark and laconic captain of the base and a woman whose compex relations to both sides of the war brings the narator deeper into the story's web. For many French readers The Opposing Shore (published as Le rivage des Syrtes ), with its theme of transgressions and boundaries, spoke to the issue of defeat and the desire to fail: a paticularly sensitive motif in postwar French literature. But there is nothing about the novel tying it either to France or to the 1950s; in fact, Gracq's novel, with its elaborate, richly detailed prose, will be of greater interest now than at any point in the last twenty years.

The great maritime state of Orsenna has long been lulled by settled peace and prosperity. It is three hundred years since it was actively at war with its traditional enemy two days' sail across the water, the savage land of Farghestan - a slumbering but by no means extinct volcano. 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 the two powers still officially at war. His duties are to be the eyes and ears of the Signory, to report back any rumours of interest to the State. Goaded, however, by his mistress, Vanessa Aldobrandi, he takes a patrol boat across the boundary to within cannon-shot of the Farghestani coastal batteries. The age-old undeclared truce is no more than a boil ripe to be lanced.

The most original book of Julien Gracq's later output is about Nantes. It begins with a quotation from Beaudelaire that is repeated and distorted. Nantes, still haunted by Andr© Breton, Jacques Vache and Rimbaud behind them is reconstructed from a remembered image in which the lyc©e Cl©menceau occupies the centre. Pathos filtered through humour guides the author as he writes of a child's experience of the hierarchy of urban spaces. This is a beautiful work, provocative and powerfully set amid verifiable and equally moving land- and cityscapes.

Every reader is a potential writer, and every writer is a reader in actuality. Reading Writing is a subjective history of fiction and poetry and a personal meditation on the links between literature and two visual arts: painting and cinema. Gracq’s poetics is founded upon the basic acts of reading and writing and on the relationship between the writer and his language. This first English-language edition of En lisant en écrivant will mark a turning point in the public reception of Julien Gracq. 

Every reader is a potential writer and every writer is a reader in actuality. The book is on both a subjective history of fiction and poetry and a reflection on the links between literature and two visual arts: painting and cinema.

A previously untranslated gem of Surrealist prose poetry from the acclaimed French novelistIn 1941, Julien Gracq, newly released from a German prisoner-of-war camp, wrote a series of prose poems that would come to represent the only properly Surrealist writings in his oeuvre. Surrealism provided Gracq with a means of counteracting his disturbing wartime experiences; his newfound freedom inspired a new freedom of personal expression, and he gave the collection an appropriate title, Great Liberty: “In the occult dictionary of Surrealism, the true name of poetry is liberation.” Gracq the poet rather than the novelist is at work here: Surrealist fireworks lace through bewitching modernist romance, fantasy, black humor and deadpan absurdism. A later, postwar section entitled “The Habitable Earth” presents Gracq as visionary traveler exploring Andes and Flanders and returning to the narrative impulse of his better-known fiction.Julien Gracq (1910–2007), born Louis Poirier, is known for such dreamlike novels as The Castle of Argol, A Dark Stranger, The Opposing Shore and Balcony in the Forest. He was close to the Surrealist movement, and André Breton in particular, to whom he devoted a critical study.

A never-before-translated, dreamlike epic of a willfully blind empire on the verge of collapseWritten in the mid-1950s but only published posthumously half a century later, The Sunset Lands portrays both a world and the ending of that world in terms that draw on myth, symbol, fable and history. The Kingdom, a declining civilization, is threatened at its borders by a barbarian invasion. An unnamed narrator sets out, with a small group of companions, to confront a threat that the Kingdom's authorities stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. What begins as a quest to the besieged frontier city of Roscharta gradually shifts into something much darker in tone. With Gracq's own wartime experiences informing this exploration of barbaric horrors and existential destinies, The Sunset Lands confronts what it means to live without despair while facing the prospect of death. Only recently uncovered in 2014, this major work finally sees the light of day in a masterful English translation.Julien Gracq (1910–2007), born Louis Poirier, was known for such dreamlike novels as The Castle of Argol, A Dark Stranger, The Opposing Shore (for which he refused the Prix Goncourt) and Balcony in the Forest.

Durante la Ocupación, dos veces a la semana un hombre realiza el mismo trayecto en autobús atravesando un desabrido paisaje. En sus repetidos viajes, en medio de una espesura propia de una pesadilla, vislumbra una casa en la que todo emana decrepitud y abandono. Intrigado, el narrador siente la imperiosa necesidad de disipar la bruma del «hechizo de ese bosque sin alegría» y una plomiza tarde de noviembre se decide a visitar la mansión. En su caminar por esa tierra baldía, todo adquiere una dimensión fantástica que confiere al protagonista los atributos de un Perceval moderno en busca de un grial apenas imaginado.En este relato, inédito hasta ahora y quintaesencia de la ficción gracquiana, el autor, con su gran sentido para crear suspense y expectación, disecciona uno de los temas principales de su obra narrativa, la espera y, en última instancia, la transformación de la curiosidad en puro deseo sensual. Un texto en el que resuenan los ecos oníricos de La orilla de las Sirtes y En el castillo de Argol, y en el que se deja ver el influjo de la literatura medieval y de Edgar Allan Poe.

Mr Gracq is one of the more stimulating and original imaginations in contemporary French literature' - The New York Times Book Review It is All Saints' Day, 1917. The Great War leads up to the Russian Revolution as our narrator, a former soldier, recalls the events surrounding his arrival at the home of Jacques Nueil, an aviator and avant-garde composer. A twist on a triangular relationship, this carefully paced, mysteriously atmospheric novel evokes the power of sensed yet unspoken impulses as it blurs the boundaries between the fantastical and the real.'