A rousing adventure story peopled with heartbreaking, unforgettable characters and a powerful allegory about the good and evil lying beneath the surfaces of human beauty, ugliness, and superior intellect.

    . . Rufin maintains a perfect balance between impatient detachment and compassionate curiosity. "The Abyssinian," like Thackeray's " Vanity Fair," carries the weight of history with good-humoured finesse' "The Times "'An ambitious first novel, dashing, abundant and, when necessary, vividly theatrical' "Times Literary Supplement"'[A] remarkably assured first novel . . . Rufin's writing is elegantly readable' "Independent"'It is old-fashioned enough to be delightful, and new enough to be moving' "Glasgow Herald "'Rufin offers the reader at least three different novels in the space of a single book: a tale of diplomatic intrigue, a voyage of discovery to a virtually unknown civilisation, and a chronicle of the adventures and loves of his irrepressible hero' "Daily Telegraph"

    A few sections of this remarkable text have been published in fragments over the years, and then, with some reluctance on the part of the author, as a series of fragments in France in 1997.The ostinato-a persistently repeated musical figure or rhythm-is a continual, stubborn, and essential element of certain musical pieces and of the life that emerges in this book. A series of connected, loosely chronological, imagistic reflections that form an emotional history, Ostinato is neither poetry nor prose. Rather, it is a kind of antibiography, in which the facts of this life are less important than the style in which they are rendered. What is there to tell that matters? Neither history, nor memory, but emotions. It is not the events that make this work possible to understand but the work that gives the life its form and its music.Louis-René des Forêts (1918–2000) lived in Paris. He was best known for his novels and poetry and was awarded the Grand Prix National des Lettres for the entirety of his work.