As he leaves the cinema where he has just watched "Casablanca," one of his favorite films, Julien is approached by a mysterious young woman, Claire. Unbeknownst to Julien, Claire has been following him for several days. Outside the cinema she relays a cryptic message: Someone s trying to find you. She insists that as a practitioner of the little-known science of narrative psychology she is acting as the anonymous individual s intermediary. Slowly, Julien allows himself to be sucked into Claire s investigation, and a strange odyssey through his past ensues.
In this novel by Marc Auge, a...

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 characterssouls who are fascinated by what preceded and conceived them. He...