Les Ombres errantes

The first volume in the Dernier royaume cycle, Les Ombres errantes was published simultaneously with 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 for Olivier Rolin (Tigre en papier, Seuil) and two for Gérard de Cortanze (Assam, Albin Michel). It was 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 classical, very conventional and very verbose.”

Les Ombres errantes in fact leads the reader down steep and difficult paths, far, it would seem, from the classical and conventional ground that Semprún condemned; a book that, as the jury president Edmonde Charles-Roux argued, “is not a novel, but a thousand novels. Every paragraph is a potential novel — that is what we crowned.” Quignard himself, who in this text speaks of men who are “acid holes in ordinary social life,” might almost have dispensed with such recognition. On receiving the prize, he remarked: “My embarrassment 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 magnificent copy, delicately bound by Louise Bescond.