GRACQ (Julien). Le Rivage des Syrtes. Paris... - Lot 88 - Ader

GRACQ (Julien). Le Rivage des Syrtes. Paris : Librairie José Corti, [1951]. - In-8, 195 x 121: 353 pp., (1 f.), printed cover. Half-brown burgundy wedge-shaped chagrin, spine ribbed, gilt head, untrimmed, cover and spine preserved (Le Douarin). Original edition of one of the great novels of the 20th century, awarded at the Goncourt the year of its publication, 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 liberate by distillation a volatile element "l'esprit-de-l'Histoire", in the sense of "esprit-devin", and to refine it sufficiently so that it could ignite on 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 exhilarating. 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 of it, and just as certain minerals are concentrated, fiction is not forbidden to increase it. When History bands its springs, as it did, practically without a moment's respite, from 1929 to 1939, it has on its inner ear the same aggressive monitoring that I can hear the rising tide on the seaside, from the bottom of my bed at night in Sion, and in the absence of any notion of time, the specific rumour of alarm, like the slight buzzing of a fever that sets in. The English says it is then on the move. It is this re-launching of History, as imperceptible, as striking in its beginnings as the first flinch of a hull slipping into the sea, that occupied my mind when I projected the book. I would have liked it to have the lazy majesty of the first distant rumble of the storm, which has no need to raise its voice to impose itself, prepared as it is by a long imperceptible torpor" (Julie