At one time (1994) Pascal Quignard left all his occupations, which were many, prestigious and lucrativas- and decided not to devote more than reading and writing. Books then starts a company called Last kingdom literary series of books which extends according to a plan that he intended no end "set of books where I know I will die," he says. That is, collection of books designed to contain both his life and his death, where he will end and will end with him.

The silent boat is its sixth installment. His first lines abstract memorably extent of their commitment and career ". Habré spent my life in search words that I lacked" From that dreadful perfect future, the "man of letters" that there are questions not defined so much by the words as a teacher dominates but that are missing. Because words interested silence his lack provides. Words "fade away, jump, run away, they lose sense" that "tremble" to fit the way that finally "live", words that were true what the Lord who dwells in Delphi, which, according to the sage of Ephesus , whom Quignard is careful not to call his name, "neither say nor hide, but beckon."

The silent boat started wanting to be within the overall project last kingdom, a book on Hell (as the previous deliveries were clarified on Paradise and Purgatory), but it happened, as declares himself Pascal Quignard, see " caught by something else "that separates it from its original intent and that makes the book claims with a singular power while endows the project of a truth and a depth that undoubtedly its author knew, but maybe he had not yet been said (as, moreover, often happens with masterpieces).

Book first deals with "signs" that make the words, The Silent boat collects a good selection of them, forcing always traced upstream of these words to find the unexpected. It is what happens with the first of all questioned in his book, when Quignard discovers that the French word with the hearse, corbillard is named, appointed before the boat with which they were carried by the Seine infants to be breastfed their nurses. What a strange sign of a word that unites "the unknown birth" and "the unknown of death"!

From there tales, myths, legends, minimal stories with stories of life and death of real characters or book, small treatises, meditations, philosophical reflections, figments of the imagination or pieces of the very life of the author, meet that happen by contrast, in the manner of a baroque suite. thus forging a sort of new literary genre that Pascal Quignard has become an accomplished teacher, where the whole mixture with wisdom cruelty and tenderness, melancholy and passion, always leaving the reader the feeling of having met an extraordinary beauty and desire, as with the musical pieces, re-read it carefully and rapture.