Château d'Argol

To enjoy a book like Julien Gracq's Château d'Argol one has to be in the mood for sentences like: "And such was the explosion of life in her that it seemed to her that her body in the consuming heat was about to open like a ripe peach and her skin in all its massive thickness about to be torn from her, turned inside out toward the sun to exhaust the fires of love in all her red arteries, and that her most secret flesh as well would be torn out of her very depths in quivering shreds, and burst through all her thousand recesses like a banner of blood and flame flashing in the face of the sun in a final inexpressible and appalling nudity." It's usually a fib when someone writing about a book claims, in order to make a point about a writer's style, to have quoted a sentence from the book at random; not in this case. One must, therefore, be eager for a bit of baroque to relish a venture into Gracq's world, at least the world of Château d'Argol, the only of Gracq's works I have read. I found—even though I'm a reader who enjoys Henry James's endless qualifications, and Proust's ceaseless circling—that it was difficult, reading Gracq, to fall in love with his overheated prose. And yet I also find myself wondering what else by this writer—a true original—I have on my shelf. (And I also find myself wondering how much of Gracq's style, as wrestled into English by Louise Varèse, is Varèse and not Gracq.)