Claire, una mujer de cuarenta y siete años en la cima de su carrera profesional, abandona su trabajo, su apartamento en París y todo lo quehasta entonces ha conformado su vida para regresar al pueblo de Bretaña donde creció. Allí reencuentra por casualidad a la profesora de piano de su infancia, quien le propone irse a vivir con ella. Poco a poco se reinstala en el lugar, reencuentra su primer amor y establece una profunda relación con su hermano menor. De forma inesperada, su hija, a la que no había visto desde hace veinte años, regresa para estar con ella. De forma polifónica, todos los personajes que se relacionan con Claire evocan a esta mujer cuya historia y destino se convierte en cada vez más sorprendente, a medida que se desvelan los secretos de familia, los celos y la violencia oculta que anidan en los protagonistas de esta novela profundamente inquietante y de una belleza sobria y envolvente que rastrea sin fin el enigma que constituye el hecho de estar en el mundo.

Les solidarités mystérieuses looks from a distance rather like a simple romantic tale about a woman who returns to live near the village where she grew up and hooks up with her childhood sweetheart, whose wife is not amused. Add Claire's brother Paul, who's in love with the local curé, stir in a lot of Breton weather and a few standing stones, a fire and an accident at sea, make a point of not talking about how the parents and younger sister died, and you have a plot that Name that book would be proud of.

But of course that's not what this book is about, any more than its cross-channel counterpart is about Meryl Streep walking up and down the Cobb at Lyme Regis. The corny plot elements are subtly but very firmly undermined by awkward little continuity "errors". The wrong amount of time passes between two overdetermined fixed points - or it passes the wrong way; different POV characters see different versions of the story that can't quite be resolved; key events are left unexplained; the real landscape around Dinard and Saint-Énogat is described in such detail that you feel you could easily follow it on a map, but then he inserts a village that doesn't and couldn't fit in anywhere near where he puts it. And so on.

What we do get are a series of short, lyrical, very sensual scenes, long on sight and sound and smell and texture, but mostly short on well-defined narrative content. When you add them up, they start to form a complex, not quite consistent view of the characters of Claire and Paul and the world they live in, in the same sort of way that the poems in a collection start to build up a picture in your mind of the poet, but there's nothing like narrative closure going on, and you could probably read the book in a dozen different ways quite legitimately.

It should be frustrating, and I've very little idea what - if anything - it's "really about" (other than promoting the Breton tourist industry...), but I enjoyed Quignard's unusual but rather poetic style very much. Interesting. And another holiday destination to add to my list. ( )