Malicroix

Fans of the style of William Faulkner will want to read Henri Bosco, four-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Available in English for the first time, Malicroix tells the story of a recluse living in the French countryside, unraveling how he came to a life of solitude. 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 nineteenth century, is widely considered to be Bosco’s greatest book. Here he invests a classic coming-of-age story with a wild, mythic glamour. 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. "Fans of the style of William Faulkner will want to read Henri Bosco, four-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Available in English for the first time, Malicroix tells the story of a recluse living in the French countryside, unraveling how he came to a life of solitude. Although relatively unknown today by readers of English, Henri Bosco (1888-1976) was a prolific, well-respected, and popular mid-twentieth century French writer. The author of over thirty volumes of fiction and poetry, he received the Grand prix national des lettres, the Grand prix de l'Academie francaise, and the Prix des Ambassadeurs. Malicroix, hailed as Bosco's "finest achievement" and praised for its "intimate blending of the real world and the world of myth" (F.W. Saunders), is extensively cited by Gaston Bachelard in his influential The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie. Bachelard calls Malicroix a "vast prose poem" and writes of returning again and again to this distinctive, haunting novel. Set in the early nineteenth century, Malicroix is the first-person narrative of a diffident, provincial young man who inherits from a great-uncle a house on an island in the Rhone, in the desolate and wild Camargue region. In order to actually acquire the house, the young man must live alone in it for three months, coming to terms with the huge and turbulent river (always threatening to flood the island and the countryside), the wild wind (blowing fiercely around his tiny shelter), and his own unaccustomed solitude. He must also complete a challenging task set by his great-uncle and resist the efforts of others who are bent on acquiring the house and the land for themselves. The novel traces the narrator's experiences as he comes into full possession not only of his inheritance but, more importantly, of himself"-- Provided by publisher