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Great Liberty (Paperback)
Julien Gracq; Introduction by George MacLennan
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R391
R322
Discovery Miles 3 220
Save R69 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
A literary travel essay on the city of Nantes by the great 20th
century French novelist, essayist, critic and geographer, Julien
Gracq
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.
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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