Gracq, Julien
Entry updated 29 September 2025. Tagged: Author.
(1910-2007) French author active from the early 1930s whose first novel, Au château d'Argol (1938; trans Louise Varèse as The Castle of Argol 1951), a surrealist Gothic tale with supernatural elements. Un beau ténébreux (1945; trans W J Strachan as A Dark Stranger 1950; new trans Christopher Moncrieff 2009), verges on the fantastic through its portrait of a disruptive Mysterious Stranger. Gracq is of some sf interest for Le Rivage des Syrtes (1951; trans Richard Howard as The Opposing Shore 1986), set in an isolated Keep along a borderline that has divided for the past three centuries two fictional European countries, Orsenna and Farghestan; Adam Roberts suggests a possible verbal linking of Orsenna with Ursula K Le Guin's Orsinian Tales sequence, which is also set in a modestly confabulated Europe. Orsenna and Farghestan each treat the other as barbarian; in something like an abstracted Near Future, the protagonist, after long years service as an observer in the Orsennan keep (see Waiting for the Barbarians), he attempts to instigate a war which would not perhaps bring about the End of the World, but might have a crippling effect on Europe's pretences to civilization. Un balcon en forêt (1958; trans Richard Howard as Balcony in the Forest 1959) repeats an essential element in the previous tale – see again Waiting for the Barbarians – but the revitalizing foe that does not arrive in the Ardennes in the France of 1939 during an interminable phony war will soon, in fact, like a vision of the End of the World, manifest itself in the form of the German army. [JC]
Julien Gracq
born Saint-Florent-le-Viel, Maine-et-Loire, France: 27 July 1910
died Angers, France: 22 December 2007
works (highly selected)
- Au château d'Argol (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1938) [binding unknown/]
- The Castle of Argol (New York: Direction 22, 1951) [trans by Louise Varèse of the above: hb/uncredited]
- Un beau ténébreux (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1945) [binding unknown/]
- A Dark Stranger (London: Peter Owen, 1950) [trans by W J Strachan of the above: hb/]
- A Dark Stranger (London: Pushkin Press, 2009) [new trans by Christopher Moncrieff of the above: pb/]
- Le Rivage des Syrtes (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1951) [binding unknown/]
- The Opposing Shore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) [trans by Richard Howard of the above: hb/]
- Un balcon en forêt (Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1958) [binding unknown/]
- Balcony in the Forest (New York: George Braziller, 1959) [trans by Richard Howard of the above: hb/William and Caroline Harris]
links
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