Julien Gracq (; born Louis Poirier; 27 July 1910 – 22 December 2007) was a French writer. He wrote novels, critiques, a play, and poetry. His literary works were noted for their dreamlike abstraction, elegant style and refined vocabulary. He was close to the surrealist movement, in particular its leader André Breton.
During the Second World War, he was a prisoner of war in Silesia with other officers of the French Army. One of the friendships he formed there was with author and literary critic Armand Hoog, who later described Gracq as a passionate individualist and ferociously anti-Vichy.
In 1950, he published a fierce attack on contemporary literary culture and literary prizes in the review Empédocle titled La Littérature à l'estomac. When he won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes) the following year, he remained consistent with his criticism and refused the prize. His novel The Sunset Lands, which he worked on from 1953 to 1956 but abandoned, was published in 2014.
The Opposing Shore
The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes, 1951) is Julien Gracq's most famous novel.
A novel of waiting, it is set in an old fortress close to a sea which defines the ancestral border between the stagnant principality of Orsenna and the territory of its archenemy, the mysterious Farghestan. Its lonely characters are caught in a no man's land, waiting for something to happen and wondering whether something should be done to bring about change, particularly when change may mean the death of civilisations.
Works
- Au château d'Argol, 1938 (novel). The Castle of Argol
- Un beau ténébreux, 1945 (novel). A Dark Stranger
- Liberté grande, 1946 (poetry). Great Liberty
- Le Roi pêcheur, 1948 (play)
- André Breton, quelques aspects de l'écrivain, 1948 (critique)
- La Littérature à l'estomac, 1949
- Le Rivage des Syrtes, 1951 (novel). The Opposing Shore
- Prose pour l'Étrangère, 1952
- Penthésilée, 1954 (play; translation of Kleist's Penthesilea)
- Un balcon en forêt, 1958 (novel). Balcony in the Forest
- Préférences, 1961
- Lettrines, 1967
- La Presqu'île, 1970
- Le Roi Cophetua, 1970 (novel). King Cophetua; it inspired the film Rendezvous at Bray, directed by André Delvaux
- Lettrines II, 1974
- Les Eaux Étroites, 1976. The Narrow Waters; allusions, allegories and metaphors on a French river, l'Èvre
- En lisant en écrivant, 1980. Reading Writing
- La Forme d'une ville, 1985. The Shape of a City
- Autour des sept collines, 1988
- Carnets du grand chemin, 1992
- Entretiens, 2002
- Les Terres du couchant, 2014 (novel). The Sunset Lands
See also
- Le Mondes 100 Books of the Century, a list which includes The Opposing Shore