This trip with Vanessa reminds me of Woolf’s The Waves because it is both personal and associative, painted in vivid, exuberantly disjointed strokes. This is hardly a pivotal passage of the book, but it is so characteristic-I love how overwrought it is, how packed with metaphors. Everything around us ascended, gently aspiring toward a paradise of feathery efflorescence: long muffled wingbeats of the gulls interspersed with raucous cries, soft feathers snatched from the foam, the wind’s throbbing plumage in our faces, the vacillation of the swell lifting the boat as though on a swan’s back. The fierce little waves of the Syrtes sea sent up countless spirals of foam around us, flocks of sea birds hovered, then flew off over the shifting surfaces of the water, as in the calm evening over ploughed fields. The sun had scattered the mist: the warm and meditative amber of late autumn, like a delicious exudation of the earth, was to summer’s heat like the warm flesh of the fruit you bite compared to its burning skin. I remember that crossing as one of those days of plenitude when the warm flame of joy flickering within us devours and calmly assimilates all things to itself, seemingly kindled by the mere transparency of sky and sea, as if they had been some enormous lens. At the book’s midpoint, Aldo goes out on a boating trip with the alluring (and perhaps double-crossing) Vanessa: The young narrator, Aldo, is stationed at a naval base, and the heavy themes of waning nations, inane war mongering, and geopolitical doom intermix with flourishing descriptions of sea and sailing.

The book, translated in my 1986 edition by Richard Howard, is full of mist-metaphoric and otherwise. But I was enraptured by this haunting story of a nobleman in the decadent, fading, fictional land of Orsenna, who is compelled-out of arrogance, yes, but also with nightmarish inevitability-to drag his country into war. Though the book and its author aren’t exactly obscure- Shore won the Goncourt Prize (though Gracq refused it!), and A Balcony in the Forest was reissued by NYRB in 2017-I rarely see mention of The Opposing Shore. Published in 1951, The Opposing Shore, a French novel by Julien Gracq, was the best surprise discovery of my reading life.

This week Molly Dektar, whose story “ Ethel ” appears in the Fall 2020 issue, examines a passage from The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq. For our Marginalia web feature, we ask writers to introduce us to their favorite works of literature by way of a short piece of prose.