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  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681371375
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $37.99

Melville

A Novel



Moby-Dick looms large in the world’s imagination. But until the mid-1930s—eighty years after it first appeared in English—it remained unavailable in French. The Provençal 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, their publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface. Giono was unwilling at first to accept—the translation had taken a few years to complete, and he was eager to move on. But he was brought around by the desire to introduce Melville to the French public.

The result, issued as a separate volume in French, is an unparalleled intercultural creation, part preface, part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy. The French publisher 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.

  • Published: 15 September 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681371375
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 128
  • RRP: $37.99

About the author

Jean Giono

Jean Giono was born in 1895 in Manosque, Provence, and lived there most of his life. He supported his family working as a bank clerk for eighteen years before his first two novels were published, thanks to the generosity of André Gide, to critical acclaim. He went on to write thirty novels, including The Horseman on the Roof, and numerous essays and stories. In 1953, the year in which he wrote The Man who Planted Trees, he was awarded the Prix Monégasque for his collective work. Jean Giono died in October 1970.

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