Fires (book)

Fires

Author	Marguerite Yourcenar
Original title	Feux
Translator	Dori Katz
Language	French
Publisher	Éditions Grasset
Publication date	1936
Publication place	France
Published in English	1981
Pages	214

Fires (French: Feux) is a 1936 prose book by the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. It consists of aphorisms, prose poetry and fragmentary diary entries alluding to a love story.

Reception

Stephen Koch reviewed the book for The New York Times in 1981, and described it as an "unwritten novel", a type of fragmentary book he compared to works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Colette, Cyril Connolly, and Roland Barthes: "These books insist - on everypage - that they are not novels. They refuse to be novels. Yet through their fragmented alternatives, we still can glimpse the novels they refuse to be - tales otherwise untellable, masked and revealed - for reasons ranging from discretion to despair to a certain visionary breathlessness. ... The unwritten novel among the fantasies and aphorisms of Fires is a classic tale."[1]

See also

• 1936 in literature
• 20th-century French literature

References

1. Koch, Stephen (1981-10-04). "Flights of a Polymath's Fancy". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-02-16.