GRACQ (Julien). The Shore of the Pythons. ... - Lot 86 - Ader

Lot 86
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8000 - 10000 EUR
GRACQ (Julien). The Shore of the Pythons. ... - Lot 86 - Ader
GRACQ (Julien). The Shore of the Pythons. Paris: Librairie José Corti, [1951]. - In-8, 195 x 121: 353 pp., (1 f.), printed cover. Burgundy wedge-shaped half-brown, back with nerves, golden head, untrimmed, cover and back preserved (Le Douarin). Original edition of one of the great novels of the 20th century, which won an award at the Goncourt in the year of its release, a prize that the author refused. It is not only the author's best-known work but also his major work in the field of fiction. "What I sought to do in Le Rivage des Syrtes, among other things, rather than tell a timeless story, was to release by distillation a volatile element, the 'spirit of history', in the sense of the spirit of wine, and to refine it sufficiently to set it on fire in contact with the imagination. There is in history an ambushed spell, an element which, although mixed with a considerable mass of inert excipient, has the virtue of exhilaration. There is no question, of course, of isolating it from its support. But the paintings and stories of the past contain an extremely uneven content, and just as some minerals are concentrated, fiction is not prevented from increasing it. When History bands its springs, as it did, practically without a moment's respite, from 1929 to 1939, it has on the inner ear the same aggressive monitoring that the rising tide has on the ear, on the seaside, the rising tide of which I distinguish so well at night in Sion, from the bottom of my bed, and in the absence of any notion of time, the specific rumour of alarm, similar to the slight buzzing of fever that sets in. English says she's on the move. It is this re-launching of history, as imperceptible, as striking in its beginnings as the first flinch of a hull sliding into the sea, that occupied my mind when I projected the book. I would have liked him to have the lazy majesty of the first distant rumble of the storm, which has no need to raise its voice to impose itself
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