Julien Gracq

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