From France, with Music
Book in the spotlight: All the World’s Mornings by Pascal Quignard
Sainte Colombe is a virtuosic but reclusive violist in the France of Louis XIV. The widowed man lives with his two daughters, Madeleine and Toinette, who dote on the cranky maestro and sometimes perform alongside him as part of a homegrown trio for the benefit of the select few. One day, a seventeen-year-old lad by the name of Marin Marais shows up at the violist’s house. An aspiring musician, Marais wants Sainte Colombe to teach him his craft, and Sainte Colombe agrees to take the young man on. As it happens, Marais is no stranger to ambition, and when Sainte Colombe learns his student has played for the king, he kicks him out of the house. But the nights are long, and the Sainte Colombe girls are lonely. Madeleine offers Marais the secrets of the métier and throws herself into the bargain; Toinette follows suit. Marais callously abandons both. Madeleine’s end is ignominious; Toinette marries and moves out of her father’s home; Marais fares best, becoming the top musician at the royal court. But his position does not bring him artistic fulfillment, and he keeps on making furtive visits to Sainte Colombe’s home until his old teacher inducts him into the mystery of music.
Such is the plot of Pascal Quignard’s All the World’s Mornings. Though his name is mostly unknown to English-speaking readers, Quignard is a Prix Goncourt laureate, and this 1991 novel was sufficiently acclaimed in his native France to be turned into a movie (starring the legendary Gérard Depardieu and his son). In the event, All the World’s Mornings only confirms one’s worst fears about the state of modern French literature. The plot is trivial, the dialogues bland. The lightweight characters fleet about like shadows from the kingdom of Hades, and one of them kind of is: the ghost of Sainte Colombe’s late wife regularly visits the violist, although she is nothing but a hallucination. Important themes are superficially grazed, never developed. Exaggerated attention is paid to various bodily functions — especially those of a sexual nature — which Quignard imparts with all the casualness of a clinician. In one scene, Sainte Colombe drops his breeches to pleasure himself while conjuring the image of his dead wife; another scene offers a vivid description of a boy urinating on snow. There are references to characters’ genitalia, including two to Marais’s penis, and the reader is informed that Toinette has begun to menstruate. All of this could have been omitted without causing injury to the text.
Criticism of this book could be more measured if one treated it less as a novel than a parable. Slightly overshooting the 100-page mark, the text is broken up into short chapters and has the persuasive simplicity of a homily. But if it is one, its lessons are little more than warmed-over platitudes served up as profound nuggets of wisdom. Readers are misled into thinking they are reading something deep when in fact they are not. Music, we find out at the end, is the balm for those “deserted by language,” for the “shadow of children,” for those primordial times when one was “without breath” and “without light.” Pretty words, but that’s about it. Equally hackneyed is the moral embedded in the somewhat cryptic title of the novel, revealed in the first sentence of the penultimate chapter: “All the world’s mornings never return.” So they don’t — but you don’t need to go to the desert to figure that out. To be fair, Quignard does not propose that you go to the desert, just read his book. It won’t take much time, either — the text is slim enough to be consumed in one sitting. Sadly, slimness is the only thing going for it.
