In 1917 the narrator takes the train to the country, where he's been invited to stay with a friend whose villa is deep in the forest. The friend, who was to have been on a short leave, falls to arrive and the narrator passes a night in the house whose only other inhabitant is a silent and unfathomable woman.

It's Gracq's genius for evocative description that makes this work a thing of beauty: The dark squally November day; the ancient trees looming at forest's edge; the smell of wet mouldy earth; the glimpses afforded by the brief flare of a candle; the sounds of clock chimes, violent wind, and, from afar, artillery in the battlefield . . . Gracq's unique style somehow lends a sense of immediate reality to the events whilst simultaneously shrouding them in a dream-like haze.

This would I suspect be a good book to begin with for someone curious about the writer; certainly the story-line is more pronounced and the prose less extravagant than in the other novel by Gracq I've read.

A quiet masterpiece. ( )

«Cuando rememoro la época en que se acababa mi juventud, nada me parece más opresivo, más perturbador, que el recuerdo de los meses en que maduraba, sin comprenderlo aún, la resolución de la guerra de 1914…» ( )