The Apprentice Writer - Hardcover

Green, Julian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0714529567 ISBN 13: 9780714529561

Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1993

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The author recounts his life in Paris and discusses the art of writing fiction

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From Publishers Weekly:

Born in Paris of American parents in 1900, Green ( The Distant Lands ) spent most of WW II in the U.S., teaching French to soldiers, working for Voice of America and writing. All but one of the 16 entries that comprise this sometimes shapeless but nonetheless engrossing collection were written during this period. The exception, from 1920, is Green's first published English work, a derivative short story included perhaps to show how much the writer would mature. A few serviceable, if occasionally repetitive, college lectures consider such aspects of the novelist's craft as creating characters and imitation versus invention, but the most effective pieces reflect Green's unique dislocation as an American citizen for whom English was a second language, the only foreign (let alone American) member of the Academie Francaise--a man of divided loyalties. In his career as a writer, that division is most forcibly realized in his musings on translation and on his parallel worlds of words. Green also acknowledges temporal dislocation: before the war he moved in a literary milieu inhabited by the likes of Mauriac, Giraudoux, Valery, Claudel, Cocteau and Proust, a world delightfully preserved in his mellifluous, but never cloying, prose.

From Library Journal:

Born in 1900 of American parents living in France, Green is a member of the Academie Francaise and writes mostly in French. These early pieces, written between 1919 and 1944, focus largely on memories--of growing up in Paris, of French literary salons frequented by such figures as Giraudoux, Mauriac, Gide, Peguy, and Proust, of hope for occupied France when Green was in the United States. There are also lectures and notes on novel writing and Green's first published story, "The Apprentice Psychiatrist," published in 1920 in the Virginia Quarterly Review while he was a student at the University of Virginia. This collection will appeal to fans and to those who appreciate nostalgia for a place, a literary life, and an attitude that have passed into history.
- Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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