The North Face of Juliau: Books 1 to 10

This volume brings together the first ten books of The North Face of Juliau, written between 1980 and 2007. A lifelong endeavor, this description keeps returning to a single hill in the Ardèche, much as Cézanne kept painting Mont Sainte-Victoire. Through an "ascent of Juliau" made with the eye alone, Nicolas Pesquès seeks to reach not the likeness but the "sensation of Juliau." As he writes: "The world is there; and if it sometimes wears such rich colors, such intense greens, it is because the sentence stands disarmed. Against that, there must exist a poetry of the north face."