Julien Gracq, the most important writer in France, is also the only living writer whose complete works appear in a volume of the prestigious "Pleiades editions. The most original of his later works is this book about Nantes, which is Gracq's personal and profound response to Proust's synthesis of me[...]

With four elegant and beautifully crafted novels Julien Gracq has established himself as one of France's premier postwar novelists. A mysterious and retiring figure, Gracq characteristically refused the Goncourt, France's most distinguished literary prize, when it was awarded to him in 1951 for this[...]