What differentiates Un Balcon en forêt from the preceding three novels of Julien Gracq [Au château d'Argol, Un beau ténébreaux, and Le rivage des Syrtes], which are based on imaginary situations, is that it is apparently concerned with historical events, namely the first seven months of the second world war in the Ardennes forest, in the district where the decisive German offensive was to take place. The events, however, provide only a broad framework in which other forces are at play. This is clearly brought home to us by the presence of an intricate intertextual network, consisting of oblique or direct references to Shakespeare, Swedenborg, Gide, Jules Verne, André Breton, Saint-John Perse, Rimbaud, Lewis Carroll and probably many others, and by an equally powerful thematic structure giving the work a type of coherence that is not dependent upon the actual historical content of the...