Au grand socco
One of 46 first copies hors commerce on blue parchment-style paper, this one nominative for André Varay.
Signed presentation inscription: “en toute amitiés, Jef.”
The seven stories in this collection were written during the summer of 1951. Kessel had settled on the island of Djerba, washed by the waters of the Gulf of Gabès, together with his close circle: his companion Michèle O’Brien and his nephew Maurice Druon. Druon, the book’s first enthusiastic reader, traveled some time later to Tangier, where he had himself taken straight to the city’s great market, the Grand Socco. This “setting for Graham Greene, handsome but no more than that” had become, under Kessel’s pen, the “Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights and the Djemaa-el-Fna square of Marrakech: my dear Jef, I understand now, I have just been to the Grand Socco. You are a forger — in the manner of Homer!”, he wrote to him on returning from the trip.
One of Kessel’s rarest titles on deluxe paper, and arguably his finest collection of short stories.
A very fine copy.