Un chant d'amour

by Frederic Prokosch, Hubert Nyssen, Marcelle Sibon (Translator)

A bord de la nef des fous, à quoi ressemble tant le roman de Prokosch, les personnages --- le vulnérable Henry, l'insatiable Stella et ceux qu'ils fréquentent dans un monde qui court au désastre --- se retrouvent tour à tour saisis par la même inquiétude de n'être d'aucun lieu, d'errer dans une sorte de no man's land et d'être à jamais exilés de leur propre identité.
Ainsi, ce roman inscrit au faîte d'une oeuvre saluée par des écrivains aussi considérables que W.B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, André Gide ou Marguerite Yourcenar, n'est pas seulement l'un des chants d'amour les plus inoubliables de notre temps mais aussi l'une des plus poignantes célébrations de la solitude.

416 pages, Paperback

First published December 19, 1960

About the author

Frederic Prokosch's novels The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled received widespread attention in the 1930s.

Reviews

[Tom Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lost classic. Read it as a youngster and it affected me far more than Camus or the Beat or any of the other stuff a young man is supposed to dig.

I suppose that I ought to re-read it to see how well it really stands up.

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story isn’t quite what the blurb made me think it was. It is more accurate to say that a young boy, Henry, sees a picture of his cousin when he is just forming the first stirrings of romantic ideas. Formatively, he develops this sort of naive obsession with her that develops into something more as he grows. He moves to America. Meets her in person. They have a very Pip and Estella (Great Expectations) style vibe going on. Which isn’t surprising because her name is Stella. Which means star, yet these are not star crossed lovers. She has an obsession with becoming wealthy, no matter what. Toying with men to achieve her aims. As the story develops it diverges from that template. They drift about the world not so much with each other but bumping into each other improbably. Stella finds no lasting peace. Henry is never reconciled with her. It is a beautifully tragic and very modern novel in that sense.

In the other sense. I don’t see this one being reprinted today. At one point Henry is working as a sort of black-face performer. Other things like that mean that it should come with a little warning if you don’t read a lot of historical works. It’s a pre-war mentality and I will need to read his other works to judge whether it is just a picture of the time of the story... or if the author held this flippant attitude. It isn’t a negative portrait by any stretch. But it is a little fetishistic perhaps.

Even with that little issue... I can’t help but rate this one a five star. It was utterly fantastic to read something so tight yet light in plot, with strong but mysterious characterisation, and descriptions that absolutely send the mind into flights of wonder.