With an austere and musical style, passionate and obsessive, self-absorbed and sensual, Quignard once again stands as a 'reinventor' of unknown ancient authors, a kind of archaeological imaginator, or Marcel Schwob and his Imaginary Lives.
Caius Albucius Silus was a Latin author who lived two thousand years ago and of whom only indirect, 'second-hand' texts are known, restored by other authors such as the father of Seneca who admired him. In a tribute directed to "the beauty of sordid things", Quignard reconstructs 53 of these dialogues or court cases, which come to be small pre-Sade novels, all of them plagued with violence and blood, disorder, sexual abuse and rebellions against authority, be it that of the husband, that of the father, that of the masters or that of the 'sovereign people' that mercilessly throws off its sullied vestals.
A Thousand and One Nights of the Roman world during the dictatorship of Caesar, which prodigiously opens up about the daily life of that time, with its secrets, its hobbies, its fears, to which Quignard adds and imagines 'its rheumatisms and its sadness'. "
Mercedes Monmany