Golden Fruits, The.
Inscribed by Sarraute and Jolas
Sarraute, Nathalie. . Translated by Maria Jolas. New York: George Braziller, (1964).
8vo.; black cloth; dust-jacket, price-clipped; fine.
First edition in English of Sarraute’s Les Fruits d’Or (1963, Editions Gallimard), with which Sarraute continued her exploration of artistic creation. Described by one scholar as “an analysis of critics as pitiless as it is amusing,” it won the International Prize for Literature in 1964:
The hero of this novel is none other than a novel entitled Les Fruits d’or, a title which refers to the Judgment of Paris in Greek myth. In the name of Beauty, the critics in Sarraute’s novel are ready to fight over the text written by an author named Bréhier. One knows very little about Bréhier’s novel, for the critical statements about it are confusing. …however, it appears to be characterized by a provocative modernism. One does not know whether the book is good or bad. After having enjoyed hyperbolic praise, it is soon spoken of with denigrating condescension or forgotten entirely.
A presentation copy, inscribed twice by author and once by the translator. Sarraute and Jolas first inscribed this volume on the half-title to a Mr. Price-Jones: A Monsieur Price-Jones, en souvenir amical Nathalie Sarraute / New York 5.2.64; and As one ex-patriot to another. My best—Maria Jolas February 1964.
The volume was then acquired by Burt Britton, to whom Sarraute later inscribed it on the front endpaper: A Burt Britton en amical souvenir Nathalie Sarraute. Maris Jolas and her husband Eugene were central figures in literary Paris in the 1920s and ‘30s, most conspicuously as the editors and publishers of the journal transition, which lasted from 1927 to 1938 and which published works by Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Hart Crane, Archibald McLeish, William Carlos Williams and Erskine Caldwell, among others, as well as translations of works by leading European writers, ranging from Kafka to Saint-John Perse. Maria Jolas translated over a dozen of Sarraute’s works into English.
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