The Opposing Shore - Couverture souple

Gracq, Julien

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 023105789X ISBN 13 : 9780231057899

Editeur : Columbia University Press, 1986

Synopsis

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.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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.

Biographie de l'auteur :

Julien Gracq was born in 1910 in a village of Anjou. As a lieutenant in the French Army he was captured in the fighting round Dunkirk in 1940 but released the following year. A schoolteacher by profession, he taught history and geography for a period in Paris at the Lycée Claude-Bernard while Georges Perec was a pupil there. Julien Gracq (a pen-name) is author of several novels, including Balcony in the Forest, also published by Harvill; describing as it does the "phoney war" preceeding the outbreak of World War II, that novel has a central element in common with The Opposing Shore.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Columbia University Press
• Date d'édition: 1986
• ISBN 10: 023105789X
• ISBN 13: 9780231057899
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 213