Distant Lands: A Novel

by Julien Green, Barbara Beaumont (Translator)

Overview

The second volume of Julian Green's autobiography. "A compelling drama of the 1850s South. . . A delicious immersion into time and place." -Booklist. "There lurks in the shade of each magnolia and is heard rustling in every crinoline the South's impendin

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780714529097
Publisher:	Boyars, Marion Publishers, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/01/1991
Pages:	902
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.44(h) x 2.09(d)

About the Author

Julian Green published over 70 books in France and was a member both of the Academie Francaise and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Editorial Reviews

Elizabeth Escridge, a winsome blond English orphan of 16, comes to live with her slave-holding kin at Dimwood, their Georgia plantation, in this hefty, slow-building, floridly written novel of the antebellum South by noted French academician Green ( Adrienne Mesurat ), who as a child imbibed tales of his mother's Savannah girlhood. Elizabeth, developing from a pious innocent into an impassioned woman, drunk on moonlight and magnolias, is driven to casting occult spells in the Wood of the Damned in hopes of luring Jonathan Armstrong. Scapegrace Jonathan--seductive, mocking, diabolical--threatens to reclaim Dimwood as his family estate; in need of money, he marries a wealthy mulatto courtesan whom he grows to detest. Elizabeth, though wed to a sweetly placid man for whom sex is embarrassing (``It's not done in America''), becomes a ``bacchante'' in the bedroom. She makes love to both men, and bears a son of uncertain paternity. Though his gothic/romantic novel may be more aptly compared to Poe's ``Ligeia'' than to Mitchell's Gone with the Wind , Green is a poetic master at manipulating genre trappings--insolent aristocrats, buried family crimes, haunted mansion, sinister housekeeper and laudanum-drugged women who are victims or vampires. His skewed Gallic nightmare vision of the American South puts a distinctive spin on this monumental melodramatic read. A sequel is expected. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Forced to leave England after the death of her father, Elizabeth Escridge and her mother arrive penniless at Dimwood Plantation, Georgia in 1850, completely dependent on the charity of relatives. As Elizabeth soon discovers, the apparently insipid plainness of the Southern landscape conceals dark secrets and throbbing passions. This is Green's Gone with the Wind , begun in the late 1930s but not completed until 1986. His Scarlett O'Hara is a far more Freudian heroine, out of control and a prey to lust for her Ashley Wilkes, here named Jonathan Armstrong. At times Green strains the credulity of the American reader with his bizarre genealogies and unlikely events, probably more believable to a European audience. But Green, the only American member of the French Academy, weaves a spellbinding, suspenseful tale not easily abandoned. Beaumont's translation is smooth. Readers seeking historical fiction of the antebellum South should not neglect this book.--Bob Ivey, Memphis State Univ., Tenn.

Library Journal - Library Journal