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Condition: Good > Very Good Jacket: very slight damage to edges; light discolouring, especially to spine and flaps. Boards (green with gilt lettering): slight crushing to edges corners and top and foot of spine; a few very small marks on front and back. Page edges: generally clean, but slight dust and staining. Front endpaper: several pencil marks and roughness where previous marks have been erased. Pages otherwise clean and binding tight. Plot / Content: "First published in 1974 under the title Souvenirs Pieux, this work by one of the most celebrated French writers of our century makes its long-awaited appearance in English. Marguerite Yourcenare was admired for her finely crafter, classically inspired prose, her erudition, her historical sensitivity and her ability to bring complex characters to life. All these traits are in evidence in Dear Departed, the first volume of a trilogy devoted to her own origins and background. "An autobiography? Yes, but an unexpected one - less a chronicle of the author's life than an inquiry into time, change and the meaning of the past. It is both a sociological exploration of ancestral sources and a thoughtful meditation on the 'hopeless tablge of incidents and circumstances,' at once banal and strange, that to a greater or lesser extent shape us all. (from the jacket) Background / Biography: Marguerite Yourcenar (8 June 1903 – 17 December 1987) was a French and Belgian novelist. She was the first woman elected to the Académie française in 1980, and the seventeenth to occupy Seat 3. Continued on Wikipedia. "Marie Louise Ascher, the translator of this volume, is a doctoral candidate in comparative literature at Harvard University and an editor at Harvard University Press." (from the jacket) use the Search Box in the left column to find other book(s) by this writer on Arbery Books Reviews: Clicking on advertiser links on this site may allow these companies to gather and use information about your visit to this and other websites to provide you with advertisements about goods and services presumed to be of interest to you. |
Quote from this book "The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in the morning, in Brussels. my father belonged to an old family from the north of France, while my mother was a Belgian whose forebears had lived for centuries in Liège and later settled in the province of Hainaut. The house in which the event took place - for the birth of a child is always an event to its father and mother, and to those near and dear to them - was on the avenue Louise, at number 193. It was swallowed up by a high-rise some fifteen years ago. Having set down these few fats, which mean nothing in themselves and which, nevertheless, for each one of us, lead beyond the confines of our own individual history and even beyond History, I am obliged to pause, dizzied by the hopeless tangle of incidents and circumstances which to a greater or lesser extent shape us all. That girl-child, already fixed by the space-time coordinates of the Christian era and twentieth-century Europe, that speck of pink flesh wailing in a blue cradle compels me to ask myself a series of questions which are all the more daunting for their apparent banality and which any author worthy of the name will strive to avoid. That the child is in fact myself I canhardly doubt without doubting everything. Still, to overcome in part the feeling of unreality that this identifcation gives me, I am forced - just as if I were trying to recreate some historical personage - to seize on stray recollections gleaned secondhand or even tenth-hand; to pore over scraps of correspondence and notebook pages which somehow escaped the wastebasket (so eager are we to know the past that we wring from these poor relics more than they contain); and to burrow in registries and archives for original documents whose legal and bureaucratic jargon is devoid of all human content. I am quite aware that such gleanings are deceptive and vague, like everything that has been reinterpreted by the memories of a great many people; flat, like items written on the dotted line of a passport application; inane, like oft-told family anecdotes; and corroded by gradual accretions within us, as a stone is eaten away by lichen or metal by rust. These odds and ends of purported truths are, nevertheless, the only bridge still standing between that infant and me. They are also the only buoy that keeps us both afloat on the ocean of time. Mildly curious, I set about assembling them here, to see what the completed puzzle will reveal: the image of a certain person and several others, of a milieu, of a place, and here and there a fleeting glimpse of something nameless and formless." opening paragraphs Secondhand booksellers |
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