Julien Gracq, one of France’s most senior and respected writers, provides a living bridge to the era of Proust and Alain-Fournier, and in his slim book The Narrow Waters (Turtle Point) Gracq explores a theme favoured by both of those writers: the mysterious power of memory. The “narrow waters” of the title are those of the Evre, a small tributary of the Loire that passes just outside Saint-Floriel-le-Vieil, the village where Gracq was born in 1910 and where he still resides. As Gracq remembers his boyhood excursions along “the sleepy little valley of the Evre,” his thoughts wander in much the same way as a boat is carried along by the current. As he records these drifting thoughts—of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne, de Quincey and Rimbaud—and recalls a constellation of long-forgotten sights and sounds—the thud of oars in oarlocks, and the drip of water from their blades—Gracq re-creates the dreamlike sensation of floating backwards in time, lost in reverie.