Les Ombres errantes [Dernier royaume I]

The first volume of the Dernier royaume cycle, Les Ombres errantes appeared alongside the two following volumes, Sur le Jadis and Abîmes, but it was for this first title that Quignard was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2002, winning on the third ballot with six votes, against two each for Olivier Rolin (Tigre en papier, Seuil) and Gérard de Cortanze (Assam, Albin Michel). It was one of the least commercial Goncourt winners of the past twenty years, criticized by some jury members, including Jorge Semprún, who lamented that it opened “no new literary path. It is not a problem that it has fewer readers than usual, since a book written for 20,000 people can deserve the prize. But it is very classical, very conventional and very verbose…”

Les Ombres errantes in fact leads the reader down abrupt and difficult paths, far from the classical and conventional terrain that Semprún condemned. As the jury president, Edmonde Charles-Roux, argued, it is “not a novel, but a thousand novels. Every paragraph is a novel in potential; that is what we crowned.” Quignard, who in Les Ombres errantes writes of men who are “acid holes in accustomed social life,” seemed almost indifferent to the honor: “My difficulty is that, since I withdrew from everything seven years ago, I no longer appear at prize time. It is a paradox for me, a happy paradox, to receive a prize for a book whose publication date I had chosen precisely so that there would be no question of prizes.”

A fine provenance: the copy belonged to the former editor-in-chief of the Magazine littéraire from 1968 to 2004, who received it ahead of general distribution, in the middle of summer. All copies of the first printing bear a September achevé d’imprimer, and the deluxe copies one of August, but the first thousand copies were printed as early as June.