And what can still delight an inert stone except to become, once more, the bed of a raging torrent?

This is another novel by the writer Julien Gracq, whose novel The Balcony in the Forest, I read earlier this month. This is apparently the novel that made him famous, and it makes sense because it’s much richer, complex, satisfying, and frustrating to read than that one. This novel, if you read the wikipedia page on it, is a “waiting novel” and that reminds me of several other similar novels both ahead of this one and after it.

So the situation of the novel is that Aldo has been sent to the country of Syrtes, from the original French title, and is there as a kind of envoy and to observe this country. This country is in a kind of odd stalemate and/or truce with a close neighbor Farghestan. This truce proves to be much more flimsy than otherwise originally suspected. The title itself is a curiosity to me as well. The French title is The Shore of Syrtes, but a little more digging suggests that Syrtes shares a Latin root with the plural form of quicksand, which adds some interesting ideas to how the novel sees itself.

This novel reminds me a lot of Kafka’s The Castle, as well Virginia Woolf’s To the LIghthouse, and Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire, even though the narrative style is nothing like that book, simply the convoluted plot within the tale.

This novel is an odd novel of never quite having anything happen, while a lot happens. It’s a lot like novels that take place in colonial spaces where the western figure is constantly out of the loop of the machinations of the in-country citizens. It’s also a lot like Jan Morris’s Hav and various Italo Calvino novels.

All of this is to say, I have difficulty placing it outside of comparison to like and unlike things. It’s a bit elusive. I am not entirely sure I enjoyed it per se, but I appreciated it and recognize its quality.

(Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Opposing_Shore)