Book release: The “Hidden Treasure”, a rich and affordable novel by Pascal Quignard

A novel is not just a story. Nor even to a style. There is no shortage of stories of love, of the loss of a loved one, of the end of life, of everyday life disrupted by a catastrophe on the shelves of bookstores. The story told by Pascal Quignard in his latest novel “Hidden Treasure” brings together all these scenarios.

It is initially the story of a woman who loses her cat Peer and finds treasure when she buries him. But this is only the pretext to follow the heroine from one place to another, from one feeling to another. And alternately from the narrator’s point of view and in the first person. In search of another treasure, one that brings joy to being.

Places, nature, mythology and music

Most of the work focuses on Capri and the romantic encounter with Luigi. Then the tests follow one another. The loss of the mother which rings a melancholy fatal to their love, an earthquake of Vesuvius, a common project in Brittany, a flood in the Yonne, place of family ties. We understand, the interest of Quignard’s novel lies elsewhere.

In his perception of places, his sensitivity to nature, to the landscape, to the cats present throughout the book. We also know the erudition of Quignard the essayist, archaeologist of ancient feelings and myths, the fine connoisseur of baroque and classical music. It nourishes the novelist’s images and the feeling of having learned something when the reader puts down the book.

Winner of the Goncourt with “Les ombres errantes” in 2002 – a book that critics found “difficult” or “demanding”, it depends – Pascal Quignard this time publishes a very affordable novel, which stands out for its quality with these tropes. numerous flat novels telling of love, illness or bereavement.

Olivier Bot has been deputy editor-in-chief since 2017, head of the World section between 2011 and 2017. Alexandre de Varennes Press Prize. Author of “Search and investigate with the internet” at Presses universitaire de Grenoble.More info

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