In “It snows on the pianist”, Claudie Hunzinger captures, through words but not only, a fox and a musician

Published on November 15, 2024 at 10:55. / Modified on November 15, 2024 at 11:03.

“I feel a great desire to start this chapter with something crazy and I’m not going to upset her.” Claudie Hunzinger chose this quote from Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne in highlight at It’s snowing on the pianisthis autumn novel. After The Great Deer (price December 2019) and A Dog at my table (Femina Prize 2022), the novelist gives a nod to her 18th century elder and we understand well this companionship, this common fantasy, this impulse, like a motor, to crunch words, life, in s addressed to readers, guests always amazed to find themselves witnesses of a book in the process of being written.

The madness here has as its accomplice the snow which very opportunely begins to fall while the narrator, double of the writer, receives in her house (another madness, architectural this one, “placed on the edge of a forest, she- even on the edge of the chaos that is our world”) a world-renowned pianist. Between two concerts on either side of the globe, the musician decided, as a supreme fantasy in his carefully planned schedule over several years, to stop off at the home of this writer, whom he had read but never met.

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