Theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the The course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a

“He’d published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shoreĭid he perceive any spirit for the future. Pic provenanceĪs mentioned above, I read this thanks to this bit in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque: Ordered four more short Gracq novels as a result. Language in this seemed always at the level of Salter or Updike but with a surrealistic sheen that elevates it. Can’t recommend it more highly to anyone who appreciates it when tip-top prose sans empty experimentation supports masterful evocation of a world and character/theme/forward propulsion. Felt it was perfectly weighted, paced, perceived. Let’s just say that not in a long time have I thought about starting a book from the beginning as soon as I finished it. It’s gripping toward the end as the war (early WWII, 1939) ramps up, but the prose is what happens in this one. There’s a little forest sprite in this - an innocent widowed proto-hippie sexy child - who might turn off folks turned off by male writers writing about sexy little sprites, but Mona worked for me because she emerged from the forest and seemed descended from the sexy little sprite in Undine, a myth I read a few months ago about a lady o’ the forest who’s equal parts woman and brook. Grange (le focus of le novel’s close-third POV) waits for the Germans to come through the forest near the Belgium border and raid the blockhouse in the trees where he and three subordinates are stationed. As in The Opposing Shore, nothing much happens, which is the point for ninety-five percent of this as our man Lt. Gracq might just be the supreme poet of anticipatory anxiety, and seclusion in a dense forest with the pulse of bombs on the horizon like heat lightning is therefore maybe his ideal setting.

Sumptuous prose, never over the top as in The Opposing Shore (see below), steady, flowing, so clear its perception verges on surrealistic swervy poetry. Stoner, most memorably, and a few others.

I love when Goodreads leads to masterpieces previously unknown to me. Gracq, generally, is a great poet of the fear of future events, a semi-surrealist Cold War prose-stylist supreme. If you were to read one of his novels, without question it’d be this one. The first novel below is a masterpiece of prose style in translation and anticipatory anxiety. I started reading him because of a mention of that novel in an Enrique Vilas-Matas novel and then decided to read as much of his work as I could find in translation. I don’t know much about the French writer Julien Gracq (1910-2007) other than that he won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore in the early 1950s but refused the award.

The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq