Translated from the French by Ralph Woodward. Original title: Le port des absents (1967).
This novel's setting is Princeton University and other places in the
eastern United States, as well as France. The time is the late 1940's
and early 1950's. The hero, Gregoire, is French, a college student at an
American university. It is a coming-of-age story as Gregoire matures
emotionally and intellectually in interactions with his fellow American
students and through a love affair with his Aunt Laura. Strong themes
are cross-cultural communication, and growth from innocense to
sophistication. The translator was the author's roommate at Princeton in
the Class of 1951. The author died in 1971 at the age of 41.
Alain Prevost, leaning certainly on experience, portrays the scene at
a great American university. At his Princeton...one meets young men like
overgrown boys, crazy about sports, jazz, fond of parties and alcohol,
ridiculously snobbish about their clubs, but morally mature,
well-informed in politics and religion, and cultivated enough to read
seriously in Chaucer, Kierkegaard and Melville.
Pierre-Henri Simon,
L'Academie Francaise
"This is the first time that I have written about the United States,
even though I lived there for seven years. But I forbade myself to write
a book like this. Until now, I've based my novels on documentary
evidence, you see, to be sure to have a main theme I would keep to. And
I made myself stick to my theme to the very end. Writing was exhausting
me, making me ill; I was not enjoying it. I had chosen my mŽtier with
the hope of writing one day a book in which one would not want to change
a sentence, a word. Now, after eleven published volumes, I have acquired
a taste for writing, I even like it. What does that prove? Nothing
probably. Perhaps this Port of Missing Men isn't any different from
the others. My permanent theme is childhood; I have never understood
what it takes to be a grownup. This tale of youth is not at all like my
own life. At fourteen I was an old man; when he lands in America the
Gregoire of my book is not mature. But like me he is learning to live.
In the end he wonders whether the life he had and left behind in the USA
was happy, but he sees clearly that it had the colors of success."
Alain Prevost, from a newspaper interview in
Tribune de Lausanne, October 1967
{ INTRODUCTION }
{ PUBLICATIONS OF THE FIVE AND TEN PRESS 1995-2005 }
{ ORDER FORM }
{ROBERT KEELEY'S BIOGRAPHICAL DATA}
{D.C. GOVERNANCE: IT'S ALWAYS BEEN A MATTER OF RACE AND MONEY}
{ANNALS OF INVESTING
STEVE FORBES VS. WARREN BUFFETT }
{ THE FILE: A PRINCETON MEMOIR }
{ESSAYS FAST AND LOOSE: A CHRISTMAS MISCELLANY }
{LETTERS MOSTLY UNPUBLISHED}
{ INNOCENTS OF THE LATTER DAY: MODERN AMERICANS ABROAD }
{ ESSAYS COLD AND HOT: A NEW YEAR"S POTPOURRI}
{ MSS REVISTED }
{ THREE SEA STORIES }
{CREATURES OF THE EARTH AND THE MIND}
{MY COMMUTE}
{SIC TRANSIT}
{THE GREAT PHELSUMA CAPER - A DIPLOMATIC MEMOIR}
{ THE PORT OF MISSING MEN - A NOVEL }
{ POETRY MOSTLY OFF THE BEATEN TRACK }
{ PARTING THE CURTAIN }
{ ESSAYS NEAR AND FAR: AS A NEW CENTURY DAWNS }
{ RANDOM THOUGHTS, ANECDOTES, AND MEMORIES OF A BOYS' LATIN SCHOOL OF BALTIMORE THAT IS NO MORE }
{ FROM THE HEARTLAND }
{ ONE OF THE VERY BEST MEN }
{ A STORY GOES WITH IT }
{ LOW CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS IN HIGH PLACES: John Mitchell and Watergate. }
{ THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WHITBECK. }
{ AN AMERICAN SOLDIER IN WORLD WAR I. }
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