Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #782611 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 600 pages

Review
"Marguerite Yourcenar instantly assumes command of our imagination in her novel "The Abyss," Almost before we know it, the author establishes a scene (a road in northern France) and time (the second quarter of the sixteenth century), and engages us in the fate of two cousins. The younger, sixteen-year-old Henry Maximilian, has set out to become a soldier and poet; the elder, twenty-two-year-old Zeno, has left a seminary to make himself an alchemist-philosopher. The book reads as if an old map--decorated with walled cities, boats on rivers, castles, people, and animals--had come alive . . . As rich as a tapestry."--Naomi Bliven, "The New Yorker"
"A brilliant tapestry of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, as sharply detailed as a Brueghel."--Michael Kernan, "The Washington Post"

Customer Reviews

Synopsis
Born in Flanders, the illegitimate son of an Italian prelate, Zeno abandons his theological studies in Louvain to seek for knowledge untrammeled by doctrine. Impelled by the times and by his restless nature he wanders over a land torn by war and by the religious and social upheaval, attending sometimes upon sultans and kings, and sometimes upon the poor and the plague-ridden. Often a target for jealous colleagues, Zeno is suspect for the daring of his experiments, for his writings and for his barely avowed atheism. ....A magnificent tapestry of northern Renaissance Europe: a throng of minor characters - merchants, bankers, churchmen, artisans, women of every sort and condition - people the narrative. But no one is introduced for mere picturesque effect; rather, the years 1510-69 are depicted as is rarely done for the past, presented in both their commonplace and their more subversive aspects.