Pascal Quignard Libros

A captivating and wide-ranging interpretation of accidental dismounting. In Pascal Quignard’s writing, philology hunts for wild game in a dark forest. The Unsaddled , which features horses as its central figure, is no exception. Taking off from puns, multifarious imagery, and metaphorical meanings—“to be baffled,” “to be thrown”—that the book’s title provides, Quignard focuses on life-changing moments. We meet George Sand (whose father died after being thrown from his horse), Saint Paul, Abelard, Agrippa d’Aubigné, and countless other writers, philosophers, theologians, or kings who fell off their horses—not to forget Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was knocked over by a dog. Being “unsaddled” can also be associated, as Quignard shows in regard to Nietzsche, with an “overturning” of values. Scenes of war, hunting, “fleeing” or sexuality—“When lovers have a horse ride, they gallop in another world”—come before our eyes, each time from those unsettling vantage points that Quignard knows how to find. As ever, he ranges far and wide in his intense quest, taking examples from across human history, from the neolithic age to his own childhood memories of postwar Le Havre in northern France. 

“ Last Kingdom is a set of books that . . . is neither philosophical argumentation nor little disparate, scholarly essays, nor novelistic narrative; gradually, for me, all genres have fallen away.” So writes Pascal Quignard of his monumental book series, Last Kingdom . In the latest volume, The Fount of Time , he focuses on the paradoxically immediate presence in our lives of the deepest, most distant past. He explores this subject through a multitude of fragments of autobiography; curious folktales; literary snippets; historical anecdotes both classical and modern; ruminations on biology, archaeology, and linguistics. Using all of these forms, he confronts dimensions of human experience which, though customarily conveyed in legend, myth, and dreams, run somehow beneath the everyday world and yet are part of our most tangible reality. To enter Quignard’s horizonless time-space is to embrace a rich vision in which the totality of human history and culture is placed disconcertingly on a single footing. In The Fount of Time we are able to glimpse—whether through obscure cultural detail or unusual anecdote—“another world beneath the world.” 

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

When translator Claire Methuen travels back to her hometown of Dinard for a family wedding, she runs into her old piano teacher Madame Ladon. After befriending the ageing woman, Methuen begins to toy with the idea of a permanent return to live in Brittany. She becomes increasingly obsessed by her childhood sweetheart, Simon Quelen, who, now married and a father, still lives in a village further down the coast where he is the local pharmacist and mayor. Having moved into a farmhouse, she soon spends her days walking the heathland above the cliffs and spying on him as he sails in the bay. As she walks, she is at one with the land of her childhood and youth, "her skull emptying into the landscape." And when her younger brother Paul comes to join her there, the web of solidarities is further enriched. This is a tale of dramatic episodes, told through intermingling voices and the atmospherics of the austere Breton landscape. Ultimately, it is a story of obsessional love and of a parallel sibling bond that is equally strong.

A bold and adventurous work of literature that explores the relationship between reading, writing, sex, and death. The first book in Pascal Quignard's Last Kingdom series, The Roving Shadows can be read as a long meditation on reading and writing that strives to situate these otherwise innocuous activities in a profound relationship to sex and death. Writing and reading can in fact be linked to our animal natures and artistic strivings, to primal forces and culturally persistent fascinations. With dexterity and inventiveness, Quignard weaves together historical anecdotes, folktales from the East and West, fragments of myth, and speculative historical reconstructions. The whole, written in a musical style not far removed from that of Couperin, whose piano composition Les Ombres errantes lends the book its title, coheres into a work of literature that reverberates in the psyche long after one has laid it down. The Roving Shadows is a rare and wondrous tour de force that cements Quignard's reputation in contemporary world literature. Available now in English, this boldly adventurous work will find a new and welcoming audience.

A novel of intersecting historical threads. The Tears is, at one level, a novel about the turbulent lives of twins, the sons of Charlemagne's daughter Bertha. The studious and scholarly Nithard succeeds his father Angilbert as lay abbot of the Abbey of Saint Riquier in Normandy and accompanies his cousin the emperor Charles the Bald on his military campaigns. His twin brother Hartnid strikes out boldly for more exotic parts--including, eventually, Baghdad--in a seemingly deranged quest to track down the elusive female face that haunts his dreams. Yet this novel of intersecting historical threads and patches of poetic reimagining is crisscrossed by a host of other themes: the enigmatic joys afforded by nature, the intimate relation between living creatures which literature has since earliest times depicted, and the mysterious power of contingent events that have shaped entire cultures--including the birth of the French language itself. This heady brew of medieval chronicle, miraculous folktale, and speculative reconstruction of history further strengthens Pascal Quignard's status as one of France's most imaginative contemporary writers.

A deeply contemplative work devoted to thinking from one of the foremost literary figures of contemporary France. Dying of Thinking is the ninth volume of Pascal Quignard's Last Kingdom series. It explores three themes: how thought and death coincide, how thought is close to melancholy, and how thought takes shelter near traumatism. One who thinks, Quignard shows us, "compensates" for a very ancient abandonment. Even as a dream is a meaning whose disorderly, condensed, paradoxical images intuit something which has preceded sleep and which returns in them, thought is a meaning which uses words that are written, re-transcribed, dissected, etymologized and neologized. Throughout the Last Kingdom series, Quignard has sought to experience another way of thinking, one that has nothing to do with philosophy, a way of attaching himself "literally" to texts and of progressing by decomposing the imagery of dreams. Dying of Thinking is the heart of this quest.

A haunting homage to life and liberty, to society and solitude, and to the binding and unbinding that constitute the weft of our lives. Drawing on materials from across many cultures, Pascal Quignard makes an effort to establish shared human values as the breeding ground for a modern Enlightenment. Considering atheism as a spiritual liberation, suicide as a free act, and the rejection of society as a free choice, the author explores philosophical themes that have run through human civilizations--most often as heresies--from our earliest days. In his search for freedom, Quignard questions the binding dependency of religion, querying how, in a world where all forms of society presuppose that someone (or some collective) is looking over our shoulders, we can be free. These reflections, he implies, are the essential spiritual exercise for our times. Few voices in contemporary French literature are more distinct than that of Quignard. By reading this fragmentary, episodic assemblage of intimate experiences and borrowed tales, we open up a space of liberty, creating for the reader space for meditation and, perhaps, liberation.