Abysses [Paperback]

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.

InAbysses, 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 the pursuit of those stories that repeat and echo across the seasons in their timelessness.
 

Pascal Quignardis widely regarded as one of the most important living writers in French.?His other books includeThe Roving Shadows,Sex and Terror,The Sexual Night, andThe Silent Crossing, all published by Seagull Books.Chris Turner?is a writer and translator who lives in Birmingham, England. He has translated Jean-Paul Sartres?The Aftermath of War,?Portraits,?and?Critical Essays?and Andr? Gorzs?Ecologica?and?The Immaterial,?all published by Seagull Books.

Chapter 1: (Jean de la Fontaine)
Chapter 2: (The Disconnected Telephone)
Chapter 3: (The Magnetic Poles of Time)
Chapter 4:Ut sol
Chapter 5: (Marthe)
Chapter 6: (Württemburg Landscape)
Chapter 7: The Seasons and the Sentences
Chapter 8: (The Antiquated)
Chapter 9: (On the Emperor Augustus)
Chapter 10: Treatise on Antiquaries
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