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.

Fires
AuthorMarguerite Yourcenar
Original titleFeux
TranslatorDori Katz
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
PublisherÉditions Grasset
Publication date
1936
Published in English
1981
Pages214

Reception edit

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]

See also edit

References edit

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