Wow! eBook
A Dark Stranger Gift edition
Author(s): Julien Gracq (Author), Christopher Moncrieff (Afterword, Translator), Baron George Hoyningen-Huene (Designer)
- Publisher: Pushkin Press
- Publication Date: 7 May 2009
- Edition: Gift edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 256 pages
- ISBN-10: 1901285820
- ISBN-13: 9781901285826
Book Description
Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920s Brittany; the other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realize who he is – that death has come to spend the summer with them. Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves and the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan – an uncannily contemporary figure – gradually disintegrates. His death seems to symbolize the end of a generation, the approach of war. That Gracq wrote this oblique, prescient novel in a remote German prisoner-of-war camp makes its carefree jazz age setting particularly poignant.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Gracq’s position in modern French literature rests on his remarkable prose. He was one of the great stylists of his century, a write with a carnal relation to words, capable of extraordinary and hallucinatory evocative power. –The Times
About the Author
Julien Gracq (1910-2007) taught history and geography in various lycées. Although close to André Breton, he never belonged to the Surrealist movement as is sometimes thought. His work, inspired by German Romanticism, combines startling imagery with a rich, precise metre.
Staunchly avoiding the French literary scene-he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951-he is one of the few authors to be published in the Pleiade during his lifetime. He died in 2007 aged 97.
His novels Dark Stranger and Chateau d’Argol are published by Pushkin Press.
