[1] The novel has been described as a "Wagnerian prelude for an unplayed opera" as it doesn't focus on telling a story but is first and foremost concerned with creating a mysterious, out-of-time atmosphere.

[2] A novel of waiting, it is set in an almost empty old fortress close to a sea which defines the ancestral border between the stagnant principality of Orsenna and the territory of its archenemy, the mysterious and elusive Farghestan.

Aldo starts entertaining the thought of crossing it, even if that leads to a resuming of hostilities and the possible collapse of his own civilisation, reasoning that destruction may be preferable to slow decadence.

[4] Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck wrote in The New York Times in 1986: In different ways, the French title Le Rivage des Syrtes and its English counterpart, The Opposing Shore, conjure up this old image of an alien coast, clearly still vivid in the Western imagination.

[5]Cardonne-Arlyck continued: There are some word choices I question, but one of the achievements of Mr. Howard's translation is that he has faced up to what are stylistic peculiarities in the French text and rendered them into an equally intricate but lush and rhythmic prose.