Marshlands

by Gide, Andre; Searls, Damion; Ugresic, Dubravka

• ISBN13: 9781681374727
• ISBN10: 1681374722
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2021-01-05
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

A slim but powerful work of metafiction by a Nobel Prize-winning French writer and intellectual.

André Gide is the inventor of modern metafiction and of autofiction, and his short novel Marshlands shows him handling both forms with a deft and delightful touch. The protagonist of Marshlands is a writer who is writing a book called Marshlands, which is about a reclusive character who lives all alone in a stone tower. The narrator, by contrast, is anything but a recluse: He is an indefatigable social butterfly, flitting about the Paris literary world and always talking about, what else, the wonderful book he is writing, Marshlands. He tells his friends about the book, and they tell him what they think, which is not exactly flattering, and of course those responses become part of the book in the reader’s hand. Marshlands is both a poised satire of literary pretension and a superb literary invention, and Damion Searls’s new translation of this early masterwork by one of the key figures of twentieth-century literature brings out all the sparkle of the original.

Author Biography

André Gide (1869–1951) was a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, travel writing, and autobiography. Though he entered the world of letters as a prominent figure in the symbolist movement, Gide later turned toward a more confessional and exploratory form, ruminating on questions of morality, sexuality, desire, religion, and the nature of the self in his work. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947.

Damion Searls has translated eleven books for NYRB Classics, including Uwe Johnson’s four-book novel Anniversaries (published in two volumes). This is his second translation of Gide’s Marshlands; he also rewrote it as “56 Water Street,” the first short story in his collection What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going.

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of seven works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, and six collections of essays. Her most recent book is The Age of Skin: Essays. In 2016 she received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work.