Melville - A Novel

Author(s): Jean Giono

Novel

Moby-Dick looms large in the world's imagination. But by the mid-1930s-eighty years after it first appeared in English, no one had yet translated Melville's great sea-novel into French. The Provencal novelist Jean Giono fell in love with the book. He inspired his friend Lucien Jacques to join him in the project of rendering Melville's stirring prose. After they finished, Gallimard, their publisher, persuaded Giono to write a preface. Giono had been unwilling at first to accept - the translation had taken a few years to complete, and he was eager to move on. Gallimard brought him around by encouraging him to introduce Melville's rich biography to the French public, who knew little or nothing about the American author. The result, issued as a separate volume in French and now as an NYRB Classic: an unparallelled intercultural creation, part preface, part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. Gallimard continues to classify it as "Un essai," a literary experiment. Melville: A Novel is an intimate homage from one great writer to another, across time and space, a true meeting of French and American minds. Paul Eprile's meticulous translation of this startling text brings the exchange full circle.


Product Information

Available in English for the first time, this imaginative mix of fiction, biography, and romance brings to life the story of the great American writer Herman Melville.

Jean Giono (1895-1970) was born and lived most of his life in the town of Manosque, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. He served in World War I and after the war war returned to his job and family in Manosque and became a vocal, lifelong pacifist. After the success of Hill, which won the Prix Brentano, he began to publish prolifically. During World War II Giono's outspoken pacifism led some to accuse him unjustly of collaboration with the Nazis; after France's liberation in 1944, he was imprisoned and held without charges. Despite being blacklisted after his release, Giono continued writing and was elected to the Academie Goncourt in 1954.Paul Eprile is a longtime publisher, as well as a poet and translator. Edmund White has written biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud. He has also written several novels and teaches creative writing at Princeton.

General Fields

  • : 9781681371375
  • : New York Review of Books
  • : New York Review of Books
  • : 0.367
  • : September 2017
  • : 1 Centimeters X 12.8 Centimeters X 20.1 Centimeters
  • : United States
  • : September 2017
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Jean Giono
  • : Paperback
  • : 843.912
  • : 124