Fires (book)

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Fires
Fires (book).jpg
Author Marguerite Yourcenar
Original titleFeux
TranslatorDori Katz
LanguageFrench
Publisher Éditions Grasset
Publication date
1936
Publication placeFrance
Published in English
1981
Pages214

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.

Contents

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]

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References

  1. Koch, Stephen (1981-10-04). "Flights of a Polymath's Fancy". The New York Times . Retrieved 2012-02-16.