Opposing Shore

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 book. As the latest work in the Twentieth-Century Continental Fiction Series, Gracq''a masterpiece is now available for the first time in English.Set in a fictitious Mediterranean port city, The Opposing Shore is the first-person account of a young aristocrat sent to observe the activities of a naval base. The fort lies at the country''s border; at its feet is the bay of Syrtes. Across the bay is territory of the enemy who has, for three hundred years, been at war with the narrator''s countrymen; the battle has become a complex, tacit game in which no actions are taken and no peace declared. As the narrator comes to understand, everything depends upon a boundary, unseen but certain,