Les Ombres errantes

The first volume of the Dernier royaume cycle, Les Ombres errantes was published simultaneously with the two following volumes, Sur le Jadis and Abîmes.

It won the Prix Goncourt on the third ballot, with six votes, against two for Olivier Rolin (Tigre en papier, Seuil) and two for Gérard de Cortanze (Assam, Albin Michel): one of the least commercially successful Goncourt winners of the past twenty years, criticized by some jury members, including Jorge Semprún, who felt 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 conventional, very formulaic and very verbose.”

Quignard himself might almost have done without the honor. In the book, he writes of men who are “acid holes in accustomed social life (…) My embarrassment is that, since I withdrew from everything seven years ago, I no longer appear at prize time. It is, for me, a paradox — a happy paradox — to receive a prize for a book whose publication date I had chosen precisely so that it would not be a candidate for prizes.”

Since then, Quignard has continued to work apart, building Dernier royaume volume by volume, extending a trajectory that had already made him widely known: Tous les matins du monde (1991), later adapted into Alain Corneau’s film, had introduced the general public to Quignard’s distinctive voice and his love of early music.