ABSTRACT
As someone who has been reading contemporary French literature, the author have often found it puzzling that certain French authors get translated rather widely in English-speaking countries while others, including a seminal and unique writer like Julien Gracq, remain mostly inaccessible, scarcely known. Of the countless examples of this discrete yet luminous centrality, a vivid recent one is Francois Bon's homage to Gracq in his novel Daewoo. Daewoo is a true-to-life novel based on eyewitness accounts about the life of women workers in the Lorraine, after the shutdown of the Daewoo television and microwave-oven factories. For a prose writer who has apparently never written verse, Gracq relishes talking about poetry. Incisive remarks are a mainstay of Gracq's prose, which can be as saber-sharp as it is semantically multi-layered and boldly synaesthetic. Gracq’s own family possessed “a few vines”, and it was he who first explained to the author that Saint-Florent represents a sort of border for the chenin-blanc grape.
