Malicroix
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A 4-TIME NOMINEE FOR THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Available in English for the first time, this “charming back-to-nature fantasia” with echoes of William Faulkner follows a recluse in the French countryside, unraveling how he came to live a life of solitude (The Wall Street Journal).
A nice young man, of stolidly unimaginative, good bourgeois stock, is surprised to inherit a house on an island in the Rhône, in the famously desolate and untamed region of the Camargue. The terms of his great-uncle’s will are even more surprising: the young man must take up solitary residence in the house for a full three months before he will be permitted to take possession of it. With only a taciturn shepherd and his dog for occasional company, he finds himself surrounded by the huge and turbulent river (always threatening to flood the island and surrounding countryside) and the wind, battering at his all-too-fragile house, shrieking from on high. And there is another condition of the will, a challenging task he must perform, even as others scheme to make his house their own. Only under threat can the young man come to terms with both his strange inheritance and himself.
Henri Bosco, like his contemporary Jean Giono, is one of the regional masters of modern French literature, a writer who dwells above all on the grandeur, beauty, and ferocious unpredictability of the natural world. Malicroix, set in the early 19th century, is widely considered to be Bosco’s greatest book. Here he invests a classic coming-of-age story with a wild, mythic glamour.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gothic historical par excellence, Bosco (1888 1976), a multiple Nobel nominee whose other English translations are out-of-print, follows the callow 25-year-old Martial de M gremut, last living relative of his maternal great-uncle Corn lius de Malicroix. Raised in the early 19th century by female M gremut relatives after the death of his parents, Martial has never met his uncle, a solitary "incarnation of wildness" whose existence fills him with anxiety. After Malicroix dies, Martial unexpectedly discovers he is the beneficiary, provided only that he spend three months in Malicroix's crumbling old manse, located on a desolate island in the Rhone River surrounded by marshland and reachable only by ferry. Attended by his great-uncle's faithful manservant, Balandran, and a long-haired shepherd dog at the estate, Martial soon drifts into a disturbed state, unable to shake the feeling that he is "among the dead." On a typically storm-wracked night, he receives a rare visitor, the sinister Ma tre Dromiols, Malicroix's executor, and Dromiols's attendant, the cadaverous Uncle Rat. Amid Martial's paranoid and increasingly wild flights of imagination, brilliantly captured by Bosco in precise prose, he begins to uncover his great-uncle's secrets. Bosco's atmospheric investigation of the relationship between environment and mentality successfully merges haunted-house tropes and high modernism.
