Book Details
Format
Kindle
Pages
226
Language
English
Published
May 21, 2013
Publisher
Pushkin Press
Description
A surreal nouveau-Gothic tale of death in a 1920s seaside hotel.
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.
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.
Genres
Contemporary