An Iceland Fisherman

Pierre Loti was a French naval commander and novelist renowned for his exotic novels and short stories. Loti was born into a Protestant family in Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, and received his early schooling there. At the age of 17, he enrolled in Brest's naval school and attended Le Borda. He progressively advanced in his career, reaching the rank of captain in 1906. In January 1910, he was placed on the reserve list. He used to claim that he never read books, telling the Académie française on the day of his introduction (7 April 1892), "Loti ne sait pas lire" ("Loti doesn't know how to read"), but testimony from friends and his library, much of which is preserved in his house in Rochefort, show otherwise. In 1876, fellow naval officers convinced him to write new chapters in his diary about some strange encounters in Istanbul. The result was the anonymously published Aziyadé (1879), which was half romance and part autobiography, similar to the work of his admirer, Marcel Proust, who followed him. Loti traveled to the South Seas as part of his naval training, spending two months in Papeete, Tahiti in 1872, where he "went native". Several years later, he published the Polynesian idyll Rarahu (1880), which was eventually reprinted as Le Mariage de Loti, the first work that introduced him to the general public.

This vintage book contains a novel by the French author, Pierre Loti. It portrays the romantic but unavoidably sad life of Breton fishermen who sail every summer to the tumultuous Iceland cod grounds. Described by literary critic Edmund Gosse as "the most popular and finest of all his writings,'' this is a volume that is not to be missed by collectors and fans of Loti's seminal writing, and one that would make for a worthy addition to any personal library. Pierre Loti (1850 - 1923) was a French novelist and naval officer most remembered for his works Aziyadé (1879) and Madame Chrysanthème (1887). Many antiquarian books such as this are becoming increasingly rare and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing 'An Iceland Fisherman' now in a modern, affordable edition complete with a prefatory biography of the author.