an enchanted return trip through time

«Ce word means: it’s false!” This is what Pascal Quignard, about the novel, proclaimed in The Child of Ingolstadttenth volume of his learned cycle Last kingdom, started in 2002, adding: “I like fake.” Return therefore to fiction, and at the same time to contemporary Italy, that depicted in Terrace in Romethen in Villa Amaliain 2006, and which was emerging in Happy Hours.

The scene is set between Ischia, Procida and Capri. Louise, 51 years old, proofreader in publishing, for whom “everything that is shore enchants me, everything that is a reflection disturbs me”, experienced a love as brief as it was tragic, with a sixty-year-old German, Ludwig, in love with the Bay of Naples, “place of the round trip of Time”and a teacher in New York State. This intense relationship, presented in 67 short chapters, is interspersed with memories of childhood and youth, “sudden turns of time”marked by the presence of beloved cats, near Normandy (L’Aigle, Verneuil-sur-Avre…