Fires (book)

      Fires
      Author(s) Marguerite Yourcenar
      Original title Feux
      Translator Dori Katz
      Country France
      Language French
      Publisher Éditions Grasset
      Publication date 1936
      Published in English 1981
      Pages 214

      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.

      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. 
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      Last modified on 16 February 2012, at 15:42