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. 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. The first novel below is a masterpiece of prose style in translation and anticipatory anxiety. If you were to read one of his novels, without question it’d be this one. Gracq, generally, is a great poet of the fear of future events, a semi-surrealist Cold War prose-stylist supreme.
A Balcony in the Forest (1958)
Translated by Richard Howard
I love when Goodreads leads to masterpieces previously unknown to me. Stoner, most memorably, and a few others. Now this one. Sumptuous prose, never over the top as in The Opposing Shore (see below), steady, flowing, so clear its perception verges on surrealistic swervy poetry.
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. As in The Opposing Shore, nothing much happens, which is the point for ninety-five percent of this as our man Lt. 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.
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.
It’s gripping toward the end as the war (early WWII, 1939) ramps up, but the prose is what happens in this one. 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. Felt it was perfectly weighted, paced, perceived. 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. Language in this seemed always at the level of Salter or Updike but with a surrealistic sheen that elevates it.
Ordered four more short Gracq novels as a result.
The Opposing Shore (1951)
Translated by Richard Howard
As mentioned above, I read this thanks to this bit in Enrique Vila-Matas’s Dublinesque:
“He’d published lots of important authors, but only in Julien Gracq’s novel The Opposing Shore did he perceive any spirit for the future. In his room in Lyon, over the course of endless hours spent locked away, he devoted himself to a theory of the novel that, based on the lessons apparent to him the moment he opened The Opposing Shore, established five elements he considered essential for the novel of the future. These essential elements were: intertextuality; connection with serious poetry; awareness of a moral landscape in ruins; a slight favoring of style over plot; a view of writing that moves forward like time.”
When I first looked to get it, copies cost more than $200 online. But recently I checked to see if a cheaper one had shown up and copies were available for a little over $20. Turns out they’re print-on-demand copies (look for the tell-tale ISBN on the last page), which look just fine. My copy even has a born-on date: “26 May 2013” — it was printed in Lexington KY, too, for what it’s worth.
So hard to do this one justice. Like a cross between Kafka and a super-French/semi-evil Updike?
To be added to a syllabus featuring Waiting for the Barbarians and The Tartar Steppe.
Totally humorless. Purposefully disorientating.
Set in a region engaged in something like a cold war for 300 years, in a somnolent, half-alive, yet peaceful state — the prose induces a similar state in a reader thanks to precise, decadent, sometimes Gothic (sometimes almost purple) prose always worth a second and third read to savor and store a sentence.
Sometimes I felt like I was reading blind, and then I’d have to read back up the page to see where I lost touch with a paragraph.
Best when read aloud since the sentences really flow and it’s easier to stay alert when reading aloud.
A psychedelic existential novel about pushing through and making contact and really feeling alive even if doing so is in no way in one’s best interest on a practical level (in the novel’s case, it might lead to full-on war) but is essential so life seems alive.
Worth going through again one day — like much of Faulkner, seems like much would clarify on second and third read. So many quotables, none of which I’ll bother to type up.
The Shape of a City (1985)
Translated by Ingeborg M. Kohn
Slyly impersonal post-Proustian impressions of city and self across most of a century (Gracq was born in 1910 and he wrote this in the mid-’80s, or so I realized after mention of a long-popular cafe where the kids these days all have “big hair”).
The way around Nantes.
Name drops all your favorite French writers: Rimbaud, Breton, Stendhal, de Maupassant, Balzac, Lautreamont, and Nantes’ own, Jules Verne.
Effluvial prose, rich in sediment flowed down river of memories vis-a-vis agglomerations of times past. (“Agglomeration” is this one’s representative word — shows up 17 times.)
Dense but with lots of space and chapter breaks. Like a humorless Sebald — if this included old postcards and images of bombed-out ruins replaced by office buildings it could sneak past most readers as a bit of posthumous Max (“W.G.”).
Mostly dispassionate, tranquil recollections uncoiled in streams of precise prose, often quietly surprising, and liable to submerge into the page if you’re not careful.
Always insightful and hypnotic, mature and nonsensationalist, unconcerned with entertaining the attention deficient.
Translation seems smooth and Gracq comes through as he does in the novels.
Get it as a gift for the urbanist aesthete in your extended family.
Recommended also for all fans of Sebald and Proust, a slant spoked psychogeo/autobiographical essay that’s not always “fun” but often seems fundamental.
Odd moments of double awareness walking and reading this through Philadelphia as Gracq traces circuitous overlapping paths now and then through Nantes, another secondary/tertiary city with a long history and a character unlike its more famous urban neighbors.
King Cophetua (1970)
Translated by Ingeborg M. Kohn
A dream-like exercise in Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood prose style infused with a heaping dose of Poe. WWI on the horizon, train travel, a villa overwhelmed by nature, the man of the house not returned, gunfire overheard all night, a beggar maid mistress, wandering dark passages, a crazy sex scene described like this: “The pleasure she gave me was brief and violent, but my memories remain a colorless blur, almost devoid of a sense of intimacy: nothing but that long body which seemed to come alive far away from where I was, eyes closed, gathering itself around a secret image, those noble legs which, during moments of pleasure, again seemed to animate the folds of the evening coat — that haughty docility, that distance which nothing could bridge.”
Love the atmospherics and the precise language that seems like its goal is to put the reader into a sort of aesthetic overload, dazed, entranced. Gracq really has a not-so-PC thing for the elusive beguiling lady love interests who emerge out of ether and retain their distance despite intimacies, sort of what it might be like to do it with an animated mannequin. Stylized dream lovers, not succubi.
I’ve also read The Peninsula and The Narrow Waters but don’t really recommend them. I own Reading Writing, too, but have only read a few pages of it — I will probably get to it in 2019.
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).