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.
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