Urien's Voyage

(Paperback)

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Urien's Voyage is an allegorical account of a sea voyage. From the stagnant, teeming waters of the Sargasso to the frozen Arctic, Gide charts in prose the fantastic journey of the Orion and the sexual and moral transformations of those aboard. The temptations, suffering, and surroundings of Urien and his companions are described with an extraordinary profusion of detail, yet the pilgrims can never be sure of the reality of their experiences. The eponymous Urien is, we now know, the young Andre Gide himself. Written under the spell of the great French Symbolist poet Mallarme, the novel is an illustration of both the techniques and the aesthetic credo of the Symbolist movement. Although written early in the career of this key French thinker and Nobel Prize-Winner, Urien's Voyage is now regarded as a significant work, articulating the powerful tension between sexuality and morality that would preoccupy Gide in his better-known later novels.

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"Substantial and virile . . . purity, austerity and abstraction rise to a peak." --The Nobel Prize Library

Author Bio

Andre Gide was one of the most influential figures of 20th-century French thought. He had a prolific literary career, during which he wrote more than 50 books, including The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist, and the memoir The Notebooks of Andr Walter. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.