Fires (book)
Fires (French: Feux) is a 1936 prose book by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. It consists of aphorisms, prose poetry and fragmentary diary entries alluding to a love story.
| Author | Marguerite Yourcenar |
|---|---|
| Original title | Feux |
| Translator | Dori Katz |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Publisher | Éditions Grasset |
Publication date | 1936 |
Published in English | 1981 |
| Pages | 214 |
Reception
Stephen Koch reviewed the book for The New York Times in 1981, and described it as an "unwritten novel", a type of fragmentary book he compared to works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Colette, Cyril Connolly, and Roland Barthes: "These books insist - on everypage - that they are not novels. They refuse to be novels. Yet through their fragmented alternatives, we still can glimpse the novels they refuse to be - tales otherwise untellable, masked and revealed - for reasons ranging from discretion to despair to a certain visionary breathlessness. ... The unwritten novel among the fantasies and aphorisms of Fires is a classic tale."[1]
References
- Koch, Stephen (1981-10-04). "Flights of a Polymath's Fancy". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-02-16.