Pascal Quignard is an enigmatic author whose writings rove with
great poise across the worlds of literary and artistic endeavour,
classical and modern, across folk tale, myth and legend, and yet
encapsulate moments of intense present experience, evoking with
just a word or a phrase the sense of each moment's suffusion by an
enormous cosmic past. Quignard's human beings are troubled,
questing souls, fascinated always by the mystery of what preceded
them and conceived them - in both the broadest and the narrowest
possible senses. Abysses is part of Quignard's 'Last Kingdom'
series, which the author himself has described as something
'strange'. 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 dropped or, perhaps more accurately,
allowed to fall away. The aim is for an overarching form of
thinking - 'an entirely modern vision of the world, an entirely
secular vision of the world, an entirely abnormal vision of the
world.' As in the previous volumes in this series published by
Seagull, Roving Shadows and The Silent Crossing, the text is a rich
mix of anecdote and reflection, of aphorism and quotation, of
enigmatic glimpses of the present and confident, pointed borrowings
from the past - particularly the European classical past in which
the author is so much at home. But when Quignard raids the murkier
corners of the human record, he does so not as a historian but as
an antiquarian. He is not someone interested in the world for its
prim and proper historical narratives (after all, as he points out,
'In the USSR, for example, in the middle of last century, the past
was completely unpredictable. For fifty years what had happened in
the past changed from one day to the next.'). He is in pursuit,
rather, of those stories which repeat and echo across time, stories
which, if not literally timeless, dance to a rhythm that we do not
ordinarily contemplate, a rhythm that channels a force which seems
at times to exceed our everyday conceptions of the transcendent by
many orders of magnitude.
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