Trésor caché

Quignard steps away, perhaps only for a time, from his Dernier royaume series — his celebration of shadow, fragment, music and silence — to return to the novel: to continuous narrative, characters and a story.

The book opens with a fairy tale: a woman, going to bury her beloved cat under a honeysuckle at the bottom of her garden, discovers a box full of bracelets and gold coins. “She had lost a cat she loved, and in leaving her it left her a treasure.” Her life is transformed, first materially, then philosophically, as the question of memory arises — “directly linked to myths, to sirens, to the depths of time, to that ‘once upon a time’ explored by all of Quignard’s texts, a temporal category that unites the contemporary, the origin of the world and the ghosts of history” (Le Monde des livres, January 2025).