In a novel about loss, the author follows the movements of his heroine.
The little cat is dead. Louise has just lost Peer, aged 17. His disappearance leaves her inconsolable. She buried the body of the feline in her house on the bank of the Yonne and thus discovered, in her garden, an old box filled with gold. Louise has a 31-year-old daughter; lives alone since her divorce from Jean; works in independent publishing. The money will be used to travel. “Hidden Treasure” is in line with “Villa Amalia” (2006) and “Mysterious Solidarities” (2011): portraits of women in the grip of fierce freedom. They are not free, they are too free. Nature soothes their torments. The novelist and essayist Pascal Quignard is not only a stylist: here he gives body and soul to the most underground feelings of a soul in search of somewhere else.
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Thanks to money falling from the sky, Louise goes abroad, where she seeks the splendor of the sea and the silence of the churches. She meets a man named Luigi. She doesn’t know he’s sick. His days are numbered. The two lovers fall in love on the island of Procida, in the south of Italy. Luigi has a flaw: the tall, handsome man, over 60 years old, talks too much about his mother. The two women in his life meet. Luigi’s mother is slowly dying, at the age of 92, in her large villa located at the top of the Ischia hill. Their world: music, garden above the sea, cats. The earthquake in the Bay of Naples and the two islands of Ischia and Procida turns everything upside down. Floods, hurricanes, tremors, storms. This is the theme of “Hidden Treasure”: how to rebuild after earthquakes?
The figure of the mother
Louise grew up in L’Aigle, in Orne, Normandy. Her mother left without a word when she was 7 years old. The little girl prayed for his return. One day, mother and daughter will meet again. The child was raised by her father. He has now settled in Dinard, in Brittany, for his retirement years. Louise was a boarder at Dreux high school during her adolescence. His journey is marked by nature, water, cats. The figure of the mother and the fracture of time are central in “Hidden Treasure”. Origins and future. Pascal Quignard is a writer of happy intensity. We can live for years without living; you can live a thousand lives with a snap of your fingers. The two lovers, Louise and Luigi, face grief in opposite ways. It unfolds; he retracts. Louise’s interior landscape finds itself transformed in one year. What changed her? The death of a cat, the love of a man, the return of a mother, the beauty of nature.
Louise will sell everything: her father’s cottage in Dinard; the house at the Port de la Clarté, bought on a whim; his childhood home, in L’Aigle. His attraction to emptiness is both saving and dangerous. In “Hidden Treasure”, this sentence: “It is possible that places dominate destiny. » Louise always returns to the house on the bank of the Yonne. The author of “Love, the Sea” (2022) has composed a volcanic novel about mourning and places. What they close; what they open. Its heroine will find herself divorced, widowed, orphaned. The three men in her life (her father, her Italian love, her ex-husband) are dead. They left him a final gift, teaching him to live without them. Louise’s destiny is bright because it has meaning. Despite the disappearances, we can continue to move forward, with feline steps, towards happiness.
“Hidden treasure”, by Pascal Quignard, ed. Albin Michel, 300 pages, 21.90 euros
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