Happy the Hours
Pascal Quignard author Chris Turner translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Hermits United
Published:1st Jun '26
Should be back in stock very soon
Hours. Landscapes. Seasons. Life. A musical meditation in poetic prose.
'At any given moment in time', writes Quignard, 'a work receives its sudden audition. Bach and Mendelssohn. Froberger in Bach. A bird in Messiaen.'
Like Bach, Quignard is anachronistic. In his remarkable body of work, the accomplished musician and writer, who once began writing a thesis on the language of Bergson, probes incessantly the mystery of time. Happy the Hours is the epitome of this probing, a perpetual beginning.
Pascal Quignard is laureate of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Academie francaise (2000), the Prix Goncourt (2002) and the Prix Formentor (2023), amongst many other prestigious awards.
Happy the Hours (Les Heures Heureuses, Albin Michel, 2023) is the twelfth in his Last Kingdom series.
Happy the Hours, translated by Chris Turner, is the 12th volume in a cycle Pascal Quignard began in 1997. These brief pieces – some no more than a few paragraphs – are not essays or pensées but reflections on the world.
Memories of a beach at night, of the illustrations in a Book of Hours, are transcendent, even numinous. Musings on the goddess Tellus, or eels in old age as they arrive back from the Sargasso Sea, fork and divide into meditations on music, history and, above all, time.
For all his erudition, Quignard writes with a mesmerising sense of awe and wonder that forces the reader to see things anew. Turner’s translation is electrifyingly alive to the limpid prose and each delicately-placed word in these glittering miniatures that transfigure thoughts and memories.
ISBN: 9781916658189
Dimensions: 222mm x 138mm x 18mm
Weight: unknown
270 pages