“It’s snowing on the pianist”, by Claudie Hunzinger: Maître Renard is a music lover

It’s snowing on the pianist : the title of Claudie Hunzinger’s new novel may seem a little strange, which initially recalls that of François Truffaut’s film, Shoot the pianist (1959), of which we perhaps remember the final images, in black and white, in a snowy mountain landscape… This strangeness suits the book, in truth, and the universe of a rather unclassifiable writer, who places his story here under the sign of Tristram Shandyde Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) : “I feel a great desire to start this chapter with something crazy, and I’m not going to upset her”thus announces the epigraph, which serves as a passport for a free and very singular sentimental journey.

It is also a winter trip, to a house on the edge of century-old Vosges forests, familiar to readers of Claudie Hunzinger, who we will easily recognize in the guise of the narrator, a slightly elderly novelist, concerned with the link with nature, lover of Jean-Sébastien Bach (1685-1750) and hardly sparing of digressive considerations. So here she is who welcomes two guests into her home: a little injured fox wandering around, like the mischievous gimmick of the animal world that she cherishes so much, and, more surprisingly, a stateless pianist of international renown who circumstances lead to stay in this house fortunately equipped with a Steinway.

The pianist is handsome, with a somewhat special sensuality, like “a glamorous Robert Walser without doing it on purpose”. He is obviously a virtuoso, travels the world from concert to concert and must, a priori, only spend one night with the novelist, following the distant recommendations of a friend. It does not matter, in reality, the circumstances that the plot invents to lead to this storybook situation, where a lady, a young prince and a pretty fox are united, whose powers of enchantment we can guess, somewhat similar to the virtues almost angelic of the dog in Claudie Hunzinger’s previous novel, A dog at my table (Grasset, 2022). The latter, moreover, is well aware of the possible effect of repetition: “This fox who arrived one evening in my life had become very important without me being aware of it. I told myself, I would make a nice place for him. Another animal, too bad. I had not forgotten that he had drawn something like a magic circle around the house announcing a new story to me. Magic, really? Yes. »

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