Abysses

Dernier Royaume #3

by Pascal Quignard

Prolific essayist, translator, and critic Pascal Quignard has described his Last Kingdom series as something unique. It consists, he says, “neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration,” but comes, rather, from a phase of his work in which the very concept of genre has been allowed to fall away, leaving an entirely modern, secular, and abnormal vision of the world.
In Abysses, the newest addition to the series, Quignard brings us yet more of his troubling, questing characters—souls who are fascinated by what preceded and conceived them. He writes with a rich mix of anecdote and reflection, aphorism and quotation, offering enigmatic glimpses of the present, and confident, pointed borrowings from the past. But when he raids the murkier corners of the human record, he does so not as a historian but as an antiquarian. Quignard is most interested in pursuit of those stories that repeat and echo across the seasons in their timelessness.
 
Praise for Quignard
“Quignard is undoubtedly the most iconoclastic of contemporary French authors.”—Catherine Argand, Lire

Genres: French Literature

256 pages, Unknown Binding

First published August 28, 2002

About the author

Romancier, poète et essayiste, Pascal Quignard est né en 1948. Après des études de philosophie, il entre aux Éditions Gallimard où il occupe les fonctions successives de lecteur, membre du comité de lecture et secrétaire général pour le développement éditorial. Il enseigne ensuite à l’Université de Vincennes et à l’École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Il a fondé le festival d’opéra et de théâtre baroque de Versailles, qu’il dirige de 1990 à 1994. Par la suite, il démissionne de toutes ses fonctions pour se consacrer à son travail d’écrivain. L’essentiel de son oeuvre est disponible aux Éditions Gallimard, en collection blanche et en Folio.

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Pascal Quignard is a French writer born in Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eure. In 2002 his novel Les Ombres errantes won the Prix Goncourt, France's top literary prize. Terrasse à Rome (Terrasse in Rome), received the French Academy prize in 2000, and Carus was awarded the "Prix des Critiques" in 1980.
One of Quignard's most famous works is the eighty-four "Little Treatises", first published in 1991 by Maeght. His most popular book is probably Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings in the World), about 17th-century viola de gamba player Marin Marais and his teacher, Sainte-Colombe, which was adapted for the screen in 1991, by director Alain Corneau. Quignard wrote the screenplay of the film, in collaboration with Corneau. Tous les matins du monde, starring Jean-Pierre Marielle, Gérard Depardieu and son Guillaume Depardieu, was a tremendous success in France and sold 2 million tickets in the first year, and was subsequently distributed in 31 countries. The soundtrack was certified platinum (500,000 copies) and made musician Jordi Savall an international star.
The film was released in 1992 in the US.
Quignard has also translated works from the Latin (Albucius, Porcius Latro), Chinese (Kong-souen Long), and Greek (Lycophron) languages.

Reviews

[Black Glove · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abysses by Pascal Quignard entices with folkloric and historical elements.
An aphoristic book liberally sprinkled with philosophical dust and eldritch ruminations.
At its heart there is the notion of the erstwhile - that the present is haunted by the forgotten, labyrinthian past.
Abstract scribbling at its finest.
Thought-provoking, intuitive, insightful, lucid, enigmatic.
Can I use the word sublime . . . (I think I just did.)

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

An accumulation of philosophic fragments, folk stories, and personal anecdotes that may, in spite of itself, exceed the sum of its parts. Quignard seeks to develop a kind of antiscripture for atheists, in which human embodiment, time, and history take the place of the sacred.

But nobody warned me about the sheer amount of bullshit you’d have to wade through to get to the good stuff. Quignard is obsessed with ejaculation. And with the idea that we all long for a return to the womb—a notion whose universality is, shall we say, debatable. He spouts categorical statements like a daft lit professor: “All cultural activities are infinite continuations of hunting.” Most such statements are untrue, because there are exceptions, or trite, because they describe something so basic it’s banal. Quignard’s also have the distinction of not making any sense.

So why three stars? In the back half of the book, Quignard approaches sublimity. His descriptions of human development and the rhythms of life eventually make a certain sense. Our structured and limited viewpoint of the present is not enough to see what’s around us. The rhythms we think govern our life are artificial and machinelike—often literally so. The accumulation of knowledge some of us have at this moment of history—the knowledge of billions of years before and after us—make us very different from our ancestors. And he has sudden moments of poetic brilliance:

“In regard to the forest of time, human history has acquired the appearance of a little bonsai pine watched over by three or four obsessional gods.”

But what gives the game away is Quignard’s admission, early in the book: “In my life, hours of antipathy-at-first-sight came at interstellar velocity.//Each time I was stupefied to find myself hating intensely people I was just getting to know.” A very French misanthropy you might say. But it oozes through his pages—like it does through Nietzsche—and cheapens his thought. Eliot Weinberger, to name another essayist who accumulates found stories, vibrates with a wry affection for his source material even when he’s making fun of it. If the world needs an atheist breviary, let it be his.

[Richard Southard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pascal Quignard's writing (at least in this series) is rather difficult to describe, at least definitively. There's a shifting, sometimes cryptic fashion in which he approaches themes throughout the book, which in themselves (time, the inexhaustible past, antiquity, primal nature, etc.) are already quite abstract. I went into this rather excited, as Quignard's fragmented, genre-less style seemed like the perfect fit for my tastes. Starting off I was a tad unsure of how to feel given how theoretical and ethereal the passages can be; they can be very difficult (if not impossible) to really grasp on to at times. However, this never lasted very long due to how broken and numerous the chapters are. And some of the more conceptual ideas that start the book manage to build off one another as it progresses, like the repeated, abstract ideas of "Erstwhile" and the named "Abysses" start to snowball into something you can almost ominously FEEL by the end (which itself feels appropriately abrupt and distant).

This is the first title in the Last Kingdom series that I was able to read, and my first for Quignard as a whole. While it ended up being more perplexing than I first expected it's certainly a book that made me hungry for more. I'm unsure if the earlier titles in the series (of which this is #3) build upon some of the concepts in this one, but regardless I intend to revisit this after I've both read more by him and become more used to his style. My rating could definitely go higher after a second read.

If you're already curious of this, then it's certainly worth the dive. Though be aware that it's a (very) deep one.

[Bere Tarará · Rating 4 out of 5]

No puedo explicar el tipo de literatura que escribe Quignard, pero se sitúa entre la prosa poética, el ensayo, la filosofía y la divagación, incluye anécdotas privadas, reflexiones existenciales y datos eruditos, me recuerda a Montaigne y me recuerda a la nada

[Sofi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5