It oscillates between straight narrative and the vagaries of memory, with several incursions into the paintings of Fragonard.

ECONOMIST: Fiction from France

In this tight, discreet narrative, which drifts from one memory to another as if love had its own time-scale, the author movingly describes how Jim freed the narrator from the phantoms of her past and the righteousness of her family and friends.

ECONOMIST: Recent French fiction

The silence of the desert has its uses for the mystic, but what she experienced as a writer was that it destroys not only the sense of self, but also the foundation of narrative art a sense of time and memory.

ECONOMIST: The transcendental effects of silence