La Boîte à pêche

A year after Raboliot (Prix Goncourt 1925), settled in his father’s house in Châteauneuf-sur-Loire, where he had returned to live after the war, Maurice Genevoix turned to the river of his childhood. Four years earlier he had already given readers the wonderful Rémi des Rauches, which made ample room for the Loire, through the grace of a visionary cooper and an evocative style. The river was already omnipresent there, to the point of becoming the novel’s dedicatee.

La Boîte à pêche is, at first sight, an almost ethnographic evocation of the forms of fishing practiced on the Loire, and of the deep pleasure they bring: a novel “of the soil,” which the Parisian intellectual milieu was quick to classify among “regionalist” writings, with its customary blinkers. Genevoix nevertheless claims this vein forcefully — and tenderly: for him it is a response to barbarity, an antidote to war, as he writes in his foreword, paying tribute to three tutelary figures: Najard, his fishing master; and Bailleul and Jeanneret, his companions in childhood, school and fishing.

It was thanks to the success of Raboliot, Rémi des Rauches and La Boîte à pêche — three texts steeped in a vocabulary of exceptional sensory richness — that Genevoix was able, in 1928, to acquire the house at Les Vernelles, in Saint-Denis-de-l’Hôtel. There he set up a study facing the Loire, and there he would write a large part of his future work.

From the library of Maurice Genevoix (bookplate).