La Boîte à pêche

A year after Raboliot (Goncourt Prize, 1925), Genevoix turned from the Sologne to the Loire. After 1919 he had settled at Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, near the setting of Rémi des Rauches, written four years earlier, which had already celebrated the great river through the figure of a cooper, offering readers magnificent descriptive passages. The Loire itself was the dedicatee of that novel.

La Boîte à pêche is, at first sight, an almost ethnographic evocation of the various forms of fishing and the pleasure they bring: a novel “of the soil,” which the Parisian intellectual milieu, with its usual blinkers, labelled “regionalist.” Genevoix himself justified it as a way of exorcizing the still-vivid memory of the barbarity of the First World War, as he explains in his foreword, paying tribute to his fishing mentor Najard and to his schoolfellows and fishing companions Bailleul and Jeanneret.

It was thanks to the success of Raboliot, Rémi des Rauches and La Boîte à pêche — three books steeped in an exceptionally rich sensory vocabulary — that Genevoix was able, in 1927, to purchase the house at Les Vernelles, in Saint-Denis-de-l’Hôtel. There he set up a study facing the Loire, where he wrote much of his later work.

A precious copy on Japanese paper, from the author’s own library at “Les Vernelles,” with his bookplate.