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Julien Gracq

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Julien Gracq (French: [gʁak]; 27 July 1910 – 22 December 2007; born Louis Poirier in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, in the French département of Maine-et-Loire) was a French writer. He wrote novels, critiques, a play, and poetry. His literary works were noted for their dreamlike abstraction, elegant style, and refined vocabulary. He was close to the surrealist movement, particularly its leader André Breton.

Gracq first studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV, earning his baccalauréat. He then entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1930, later studying at the École libre des sciences politiques (Sciences Po.), both schools of the University of Paris at the time. In 1932, he read André Breton's Nadja, which deeply influenced him. His first novel, The Castle of Argol, is dedicated to that surrealist writer, to whom he devoted a whole book in 1948.

In 1936, he joined the French Communist Party but quit the party in 1939 after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed. During the Second World War, he was a prisoner of war in Silesia with other officers of the French Army. One of the friendships he formed there was with author and literary critic Armand Hoog, who later described Gracq as a passionate individualist and ferociously anti-Vichy.

In 1950, he published a fierce attack on contemporary literary culture and literary prizes in the review Empédocle titled La Littérature à l'estomac. When he won the Prix Goncourt for The Opposing Shore (Le Rivage des Syrtes) the following year, he remained consistent with his criticism and refused the prize. 

Gracq taught history and geography in secondary school (high school) until he retired in 1970. In 1979, he wrote the foreword to a re-edition of the Journal de analogize (1954) by Suzanne Lilar, a work he called a "sumptuous initiation to poetry" ("une initiation somptueuse à la poésie").

In 1989, Gracq's work was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. He remained distant from major literary events and faithful to his first publisher, José Corti. Gracq lived a quiet life in his native town of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, on the banks of the river Loire. On 22 December 2007, a couple of days after suffering a dizzy spell, he died at the age of 97 in a hospital in Angers.

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The Opposing Shore

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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