'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. 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. 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.įor 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. As the narrator comes to understand, everything depends upon a boundary, unseen but certain, separating the two sides. 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. The fort lies at the country's border at its feet is the bay of Syrtes. 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. As the latest work in the Twentieth-Century Continental Fiction Series, Gracq'a masterpiece is now available for the first time in English. 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. 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. The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes, 1951) is Julien Gracqs most famous novel.

With four elegant and beautifully crafted novels Julien Gracq has established himself as one of France's premier postwar novelists.

The opposing shore by julien gracq