A Dark Stranger

Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920s Brittany. The other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realize who he isthat 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 Allanan uncannily contemporary figuregradually 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.

Staunchly avoiding the French literary scene—he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951—Julien Gracq (1910–2007) is one of the few authors to be published in the Pléiade during his lifetime.