It is the text of a "good-for-nothing", a woman who has nothing to do with art, according to Leïla Slimani's new book on the French state radio station France Inter.
"The Scent of Flowers at Night" is lyrics about failure, and whether it succeeded or not will only become clear as Slimani elaborates on the indigestibility of the clams she previously enjoyed.
What this question says about Slimani's literature, or rather about the state of French literary criticism, remains to be seen.
The final verdict of the excited panel of critics, that Slimani's report on the nocturnal lockdown in the Punta della Dogana Museum in Venice is one of the most beautiful literary shipwrecks of the day, is certainly understandable.
The somewhat exaggerated criticism can largely be explained by the fact that Leïla Slimani is one of the most successful contemporary authors in France.
Her Goncourt Prize-winning novel Then You Can Sleep, about post-colonial power structures between high earners in Europe and low-wage immigrant workers, sold more than a million copies in the French original alone.
Slimani, born in 1981 in Rabat, Morocco, is currently working on a trilogy about her family, which, with a grandmother from Alsace and a grandfather from Morocco, provides sufficient material for an autobiographical novel, a "family saga".
In a writing crisis, Slimani's publishers persuaded her to contribute a volume to the series "Une nuit au musée" and spend a night contemplating the modern art exhibited there from the collection of French collector and multi-billionaire François Pinault.
Although Slimani admits that isolation and self-isolation are prerequisites for her writing, museums are still “overwhelming places” for the author, where she only feels “foreignness and distance”.
She herself is even convinced that she has nothing to say about contemporary art.
"The scent of flowers at night" is based on a "writing without necessity" that she "brought on".
Can that go well?
Topics familiar to readers
A narrow bunk in a cubbyhole is made available to Slimani as a bed for the night.
The restless author doesn't last long on it and instead roams barefoot through the dark corridors in search of a place where she can smoke without being observed.
The physical is a constant focus in Slimani's account of a night in which she ponders freedom a great deal but never feels it for a second.
One reads, for example, about the redeeming effect of death, about the "desolation of our organ functions", about "the ugliness of bare flesh" and the "powerlessness to which illness condemns us".
These are themes familiar to readers of her novels of murder, sex addiction and bourgeois bigotry.