From the moment he arrives at an elegant seaside hotel with his lover, Allan unsettles and obsesses the other guests. Elusive, equivocal, beautiful, he lives, gambles, swims and dances with a strange fierceness that they find intoxicating. Soon he even haunts their dreams. One by one, each guest is fatally drawn to Allan. And, as the hazy August heat fades and summer comes to an end, they gravitate towards self-destruction. Rich, lushly poetic, A Dark Stranger is a dreamlike portrayal of lives lived on the edge of the abyss.
"Gracq's position in modern French literature rests on his remarkable prose. He was one of the great stylists of his century, a writer with a carnal relation to words, capable of extraordinary and hallucinatory evocative power." - The Times
"Gracq is unique. His texts shine in the darkness of literature... Every page is a discovery and we are grateful for their beauty, their intelligence and their exoticism." - Libération
From the moment he arrives at an elegant seaside hotel with his lover, Allan unsettles and obsesses the other guests. Elusive, equivocal, beautiful, he lives, gambles, swims and dances with a strange fierceness that they find intoxicating. Soon he even haunts their dreams. One by one, each guest is fatally drawn to Allan. And, as the hazy August heat fades and summer comes to an end, they gravitate towards self-destruction. Rich, lushly poetic, A Dark Stranger is a dreamlike portrayal of lives lived on the edge of the abyss.
Praise
"Gracq's position in modern French literature rests on his remarkable prose. He was one of the great stylists of his century, a writer with a carnal relation to words, capable of extraordinary and hallucinatory evocative power." - The Times
"Gracq is unique. His texts shine in the darkness of literature... Every page is a discovery and we are grateful for their beauty, their intelligence and their exoticism." - Libération
