Author: Julien Gracq Year: 1945 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Fiction, Classic
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ISBNs: 9781901285826 9781908968357 1901285820 1908968354 |
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Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920's Brittany. The other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is-that Death has come to spend the summer with them. Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan-an uncannily contemporary figure-gradually disintegrates. His death seems to symbolize the end of a generation, the approach of war.
That Gracq wrote this oblique, prescient novel in a remote German prisoner-of-war camp makes its carefree jazz age setting particularly poignant.
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