Moravagine
The previous year's novel and its opposite — savagery against solitude, both about a man who cannot stop.
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Dan Yack
A jilted millionaire sails three artists to Antarctica to see what silence does to them — then comes back and buys the whaling trade.
- 1927
About Blaise Cendrars
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeCendrars' strangest and most tender novel arrived in two volumes — Le Plan de l'Aiguille (1927) and Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929). Dan Yack, a rich young Englishman wrecked by a love affair in St Petersburg, charters a ship, collects three artists — a sculptor, a musician, a poet — and maroons the party on a sub-Antarctic island to winter at the end of the world. What the ice does to them, and what Dan Yack becomes afterward, is the book: the polar experiment first, and then a long dictated confession spoken into a recording machine on a Pacific island. (Full story below; the ending is behind the accordion.)
The story, in more detail
The first volume is an adventure novel that keeps quietly turning into something else. Dan Yack's Antarctic scheme is a rich man's joke with a serious question underneath — take three men whose whole lives are made of art and remove the world they make it for — and the polar winter answers with a slowness Cendrars renders beautifully: the light, the whale-bone shore, the boredom, the drift. Where the earlier novels ran on speed, this one runs on cold, and it contains the gentlest writing he ever did.
The second volume changes instrument entirely: Dan Yack, now a whaling magnate with a fortune built on the ice he once played at, sits on a Pacific island talking into a dictation machine — a novel delivered as recorded speech, decades before that was a common idea — circling the loves and losses the first volume set in motion, above all the young actress Mireille. Read together, the two make a diptych about what a man does with the rest of his life after the adventure ends, and stand a little apart from the Cendrars legend: no legionnaire's swagger, no monster on the loose, just the long human weather after the expedition. Nina Rootes' English brought both volumes over as Dan Yack.
The full story
St Petersburg, before the war: Dan Yack, young, English, and enormously rich, is broken by a love affair and leaves on impulse — buying a ship and recruiting three artists, a sculptor, a musician, and a poet, to accompany him to the far southern ice. On a bleak island by the whaling grounds the four settle in for the polar winter, and the experiment does what experiments do: with no audience, no city, and no seasons to speak of, the artists come apart at different speeds while Dan Yack, the dilettante who arranged it all, discovers he is the one the emptiness suits.
He returns to the world with a plan and no illusions, and turns the ice into an industry — whaling on a modern scale, a fortune made where the party had merely wintered. The second volume finds him years on, established, restless, and alone with a recording machine on a Pacific island, dictating his life: the island, the friends, the businesses, and Mireille, the young actress who becomes the great love of the confession.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
The confessions end where money and momentum cannot reach: Mireille, filmed and adored and ill, dies of tuberculosis, and the whaling magnate — who converted grief into an industry once already — finds the trick will not work twice. What is left is the recording: a man alone with a machine, talking, having outlived the expedition, the friends, the fortune's meaning, and the woman, still narrating because it is the only thing he has not yet lost. Cendrars gives the century's loudest life a very quiet ending.
Why we recommend it
An experiment with people in it
Three artists, no audience, one winter — a premise that would carry a novel on its own, and here is only the first half.
The quiet Cendrars
The cold slows his sentences down, and what they do at that speed is the surprise of the shelf.
A form ahead of its time
The dictated second volume is a genuinely strange piece of modernist architecture, and it works.
What this book explores
Timeline
1927
Au Sans Pareil publishes the first volume, Le Plan de l'Aiguille — the Antarctic expedition, three artists marooned for a polar winter.
1929
Grasset publishes the second volume, Les Confessions de Dan Yack, a novel delivered as speech dictated into a recording machine; Nina Rootes later brought both volumes into English as Dan Yack.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Au Sans Pareil
- 1927
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Grasset
- 1929
Paperback
- Paperback
- Peter Owen
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Dan Yack: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Dan Yack?
Blaise Cendrars. It appeared in two volumes — Le Plan de l'Aiguille (1927) and Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929).
What is Dan Yack about?
Dan Yack, a rich young Englishman wrecked by a love affair, charters a ship, gathers three artists — a sculptor, a musician, a poet — and maroons the party on a sub-Antarctic island to winter at the end of the world.
What kind of novel is it?
Cendrars's strangest and most tender — an adventure novel that keeps quietly turning into something else, half polar experiment and half confession.
How is it structured?
In two volumes: the Antarctic expedition first, then a long confession Dan Yack speaks into a recording machine on a Pacific island.
Is Dan Yack well known?
It is one of Cendrars's lesser-known novels, but a favorite of readers who prize his oddest and most inventive work.