The 3 best books by Marguerite Yourcenar

Few writers are known who have made a pseudonym their official name, far beyond the custom or popular use that serves the cause of marketing, or that represents a disguise for the writer to become a different person. In the case of Marguerite crayencour, The use of his anagrammed surname derived, once he was nationalized in the United States in 1947, in the official status of the now world-renowned Yourcenar.

Between the anecdotal and the fundamental, this fact points to the free transition between the person and the writer. Because Marguerite crayencour, devoted to literature in all its manifestations; explorer of letters from its classical origins; and with his overflowing intellectual capacity towards narrative erudition in form and substance, he always moved with firm will and irrevocable literary commitment as a way of life and as a channel and fundamental testimony of the human in history.

Self-taught literary training, typical of a woman whose youth coincided with the Great War, her intellectual concerns were promoted from the figure of her father. With its aristocratic origins, hit by the first great European conflict, the figure of the cultivator father allowed that empowerment of the gifted young woman.

In her early days as a writer (at the age of twenty, she had already written her first novel) she made this task compatible with translating great Anglo-Saxon authors such as her own into her native French. Virginia Woolf o Henry james.

And the truth is that throughout her life she continued with this double task of developing her own creation or rescuing to the French the most valuable works among the Greek classics or any other creations that assaulted her on her frequent travels.

Marguerite's own work is recognized as a highly elaborate set of works, full of wisdom in a form that is as sophisticated as it is enlightening. The novels, poems or stories of this French author combine brilliant form with transcendental background.

The recognition of all her dedication came with her emergence as the first woman to enter the French Academy, back in 1980.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Marguerite Yourcenar

Memories of Hadrian

The idea was to create a kind of newspaper presented in installments in the magazine La Table Ronde.

An idea that, thanks to the overwhelming presentation of the story of the emperor who knew the greatest glory of the Roman Empire, captured a multitude of readers and ended up becoming the author's most valued novel some years later. Reading this book is an act of wonderful essential mimicry.

From the greatest glory of the human being to the most basic drive, everything can be read with the same score of a shared human soul ultimately.

It is not about abounding in the epic or the mythical of a character as far away as close to Roman mythology, the novel sets the scene perfectly but also delves into those human motivations, riding on their contradictions and overcoming the decisions that guide them. destiny.

And it is that, the fate that makes up our days from those of the most famous character to those of the most anonymous existence, which makes this novel a completely empathetic reading that makes us inhabit the heart and brain of the greatest of the emperors. Hispanics.

Memories of Hadrian

Alexis or the treatise of the useless combat

It usually happens that in the short narrative we find jewels that can be read at once and that, nevertheless, leave flavors of a great work in its kind of synthesis. It is not easy to go into the depths from a brief presentation, unless we meet an author from Marguerite's faculty.

In its epistolary nature, this short novel addresses the theme of the most liberated love at a time when liberation in this area sounded like a utopian song. Only a woman, always in struggle and vindication, could face the frank task of the realism of love in all its edges.

Alexis writes to his wife to clarify everything concerning his own soul, everything that he always buried between customs and morals. Your written testimony charges the value of the release made testimony. The struggle of the human with himself is the worst of the battles and is still fought with too much assiduity today.

It is not about aiming at debauchery as a space for coexistence, only at the recognition of each person's internal forum, at the presentation of the ecce homo that we all are, exposed to expectations about ourselves based on roles.

A short novel that precisely in its brevity optimizes the language towards the deepest understanding. One of those little gems that everyone should read to understand and to understand themselves.

Alexis or the treatise of the useless combat

The coup de grace

The best-known later short novel «A Chronicle of a Death Foretold» continues in this line as long as it has an intuited ending that, despite everything, powerfully draws our attention to its previous development. A story to inhabit the intended destinies of Eric, Conrad and Sophie, like gods made omniscient readers.

Only, even God himself does not know what happens before, in that time of free will pre-granted and that contains each human soul for full development until the tragedy that finally writes the end of everything.

And love is precisely that perfect area of ​​development for the freedom of being. The designs of love are inscrutable if sentiment is allowed to channel, even more so when circumstances always point to the impossibility of the most liberated love.

The coup de grace
5/5 - (8 votes)

2 comments on “The 3 best books by Marguerite Yourcenar”

  1. Strongly disagree! Alexis is not the best Yourcenar novel, not even by sham. Memories of Adriano perhaps, but Opus Nigrum cannot be missing from the list of his best works.

    Reply
    • Thank you Victor.
      Differences always enrich. I have not put the first, goes the second. But come on, this is very subjective. For me, Alexis is a character with whom you get a strange empathy that won me over. The epistolary roll gives it a very intimate point that brings you even closer.

      Reply

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