The Roving Shadows

Opening a cycle of books, this short volume is made of brief fragments that leap without warning between topics: a cockcrow, a scene recalled from early life, the emperor Tiberius, Descartes leaving France in 1648, a classic of Chinese erotic fiction, Teresa of Avila, Clovis seizing Soissons and the vase broken there, the Second World War. Ancient authors such as Apuleius and Marcus Aurelius sit beside Japanese literature, Jansenism and the composer Couperin. Between essay, aphorism and autobiography, the fragments slowly reveal recurring concerns: the pull of the distant past, which the author calls the Jadis, against a market economy that turns people into consumers without memory; images against words; money against art; and the value of reading, silence and solitude as forms of freedom.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Nonfiction

Length

189 pages in the original

Series

Dernier royaume, book 1

First published

2002 by Grasset

Author's age

54 when first published

ISBN

9782246637417 (original)

9780857420091 (Seagull Books, India)

9781803093659 (Seagull Books, India)

More

Wikidata