The Stranger and Other Stories
Publisher
:
Éditions Fayard
Parution date
:
2008
EAN
:
9782213635958
Description
With this new collection of novellas and short stories, including one—the title story—never before published, Julian Green artfully combines the wry style of the French psychological novel, the tradition of American fantastic literature, and the melancholic flavor of the old South. From the 1920s to end of the last century, Green portrays the unfinished lives of young men haunted by the presence of doubles, half real, half imagined; wounded hearts tormented by memories; and the fear of an existence without significance.
In “L’inconnu,” the showpiece of the collection written right before Julian Green’s death in 1997, Vivien is a young Narcissus, a libertine with little ambition. He is accosted one day by a mysterious man in his forties with a deceptively simple request: he wants to accompany Vivien through his youth, observe as he goes through the inevitable ups and downs of life.
In “Vie et mort de Michael Corvin,” the narrator, a student at the University of Virginia, is being followed from afar by the son of his recently deceased mentor. Like a ghostly vision, the man seems omnipresent but never actually speaks to him until one night when the student finds him seated at his desk, flipping through his letters.
In “Maggie Moonshine,” an elderly Southern woman finds a baby girl abandoned on her doorstep. She has been living alone all these years, haunted by the shadow of the fiancé she left at the altar. She finds solace with this little girl, but her redemption is short-lived, and life continues as before after the grown-up girl runs away with a young lover.
Author
julian Green : Julian Green was born in 1900 of American parents in Paris, where he spent most of his life until his death in August 1998. Novelist, biographer, playwright, critic, and first non-French national elected to the Académie Française (1971), he was greatly attached to his American nationality and to his roots in Georgia. A large section of his writing constitutes a quest for identity by an American living abroad in France. His most famous works include The Distant Land (1991) and The Stars of the South (1996), published by Marion Boyars; The Closed Garden (1928) and Memories of Happy Days (1942), published by Harper & Brothers; Each in His Own Darkness, Pantheon Books (1960); God's Fool: The Life of Francis of Assisi, HarperOne (1987); and most recently The Other Sleep with illustrations by Gustav Klimt, Pushkin Press (2002).
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