"A Dark Stranger" by Julien Gracq

W.J. Strachan's translation of the French writer Julien Gracq's novel Un Beau Tenebreux seems to be no longer in print, and this 1951 first English edition is now quite scarce. Set in a Brittany seaside town, "A Dark Stranger" ponderously tells of a charismatic stranger and his lover, who captivate the imaginations of the other guests in a hotel where he goes to stay, until it becomes clear that his indifference to his huge losses at the local casino are merely a prelude to a suicide pact.

Inspired by Vigny's poem 'Les Amants de Montmorency', Un Beau Tenebreux was written while Gracq was interned in a German prisoner of war camp during the second world war, although it is set in the 1920s. After the war, Gracq lived something of a double life: under his real name of Louis Poirier he led an utterly respectable existence as a teacher of creative writing at a lycée in Paris, until his pupils grew suspicious, decided to spy on him outside the classroom, and discovered that their teacher was in fact one of the most celebrated surrealist writers.

He was also self-consciously an anachronistic writer who refused to allow any of his novels to appear in paperback; originally they were all published in France with the pages uncut. A staunch opponent of the publicity and media hype that began to surround literary celebrities in the 1950s, when he died in 2007, he had politely turned down three invitations from President Mitterrand to dine at the Élysée. He won, and turned down the Prix Goncourt in 1951. He was quoted as saying, "A writer is one who writes instead of talking, who reads rather than making public appearances, who meditates at home rather than droning away about himself on TV." There are very few writers today who could make such a claim without hypocrisy.

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