when the novel is poem

If he is a man of letters who inspires me the most lively respect, it is Julien Gracq! Not only it brought the art of writing to heights that few reach, but in addition he refused all his life the thousand little meanness and other compromises that are unfortunately the lot of a certain Parisian literary microcosm. It was not him, these hacks running dinners in town, courting critical to dream and meanly to win a particular prize more or less prestigious. Appear on bestseller lists was the least of his worries and please the greatest number the least of his desires. No, Gracq was made of sterner stuff, it belonged to a small closed circle, one of the Lords of Literature found in the perfection of their work and the approval of posterity their supreme awards.

They willingly gave him the image of an austere hermit in unusual verb and rigid silhouette, little concerned about the problems of his time that he preferred the poetry of Novalis or the music of Wagner. Certainly Gracq was a quiet man, secret, unwilling to media effusions, the antithesis of a Sartre, he liked besides moderately. But was it provided that a pure esthete contemptuously retired to his Ivory Tower, incurious of his day concerned only to chisel for some "happy few" demanding novels diamond-prose? I do not think. Gracq was simply an artist of rare moral elegance, revulsion that all forms of mediocrity, and that the only true and authentic relationship between the author and his reader was the text itself.

Personally, I have this dear Julien read great happiness and I will never forget, especially the rapture that was mine when I discovered this "Rivage Syrtes" whose evocative title is in itself the promise of endless romantic pleasures. The plot of the book is minimalist. A Aldo is sent by the Republic of Orsenna as an observer in a fortress from which he watches Farghestan enemy. But the wait is prolonged, becoming gradually the essence of the story ... The devil! you say. Curious approach for a novelist to tell a story where there is almost nothing going! But is not that precisely all the mysterious genius of this masterpiece?

Flaubert dreamed of writing a book without a subject, which exists only through the magic of his writing. Well, it's almost that dream realized here Gracq. It does not relate events, do not imagine adventures, do not chain situations. Or so little! He especially plant decor, painted as a landscape, and observes the Time, invisible, elusive, walking slowly but surely towards who knows what exactly. As much as a novel, "Le Rivage Syrtes" is a long prose poem, a contemplative reverie, a symphony of words whose majesty dreamlike moments recalls the bewitching music of Chants de Maldoror, which is hardly surprising when you consider the estimated Gracq was to Lautréamont.

Anyway, me, if I often plunges in this book, that's the pleasure of finding this style to unique spells, these unheard phrases that seem to combine the delicacy of lace and purity of marble, sentences of such splendor, a wonderful preciousness, we want to read them aloud to better enjoy the harmonious architecture ... Well, why not say it? Few novelists in the twentieth century, will have better served the French language and literature Julien Gracq!