her WITH THE ANIMALS is one of the very best books I read last year, but I didn't even finish this one.

Efina tells of the relationship between an actor, T, and Efina over the course of time. They write each other sometimes unsent letters avowing love, spewing disgust, letters that taunt, letters born of boredom. The two encounter each other, often by contrived chance, they refuse to acknowledge each other's presence, they repair to a hotel room. For a time they live together; for long periods they are out of touch with each other. Along the way, both have children, spouses, other affairs.

There's a story in that, but Revaz doesn't spell out each word of it.. Someone asked me recently why I'm keener on fiction from the Continent than from English speakers; dunno, said I, and fumbled about with words like 'fresher', 'less constrained', 'more detached', 'far more subtle'. Reading this reminded me of that. An Anglo writer would I suspect most likely have begun with the first encounter between the two, followed the timeline to an end of it, packed the book with descriptions of the relationships with wives, husbands, lovers, children and inserted a good deal of her/himself however indirectly.

A book like that would tell the usual story in the usual way and be a bore, probably a banal one.. What Revaz does is more interesting and more effective. She begins the novel at some indeterminate moment after the affair has begun and, after showing some of the letters the two exchanged and telling us whether they were saved, trashed, forgotten, she shows various moments ('episodes' would imply a sense of drama or significance) in T's life and in Efina's, some shared and others apart, over an indeterminate number of years. This to me makes the novel far more true to life than a conventional, fleshed-out story would have been: When I look back over the years, or even today, it's not a boundless and placid sea that I look at but skerries rising out of the sea. We don't live each moment equally and we don't recall times past as a continuous & retrievable expanse; memory has us leaping from one skerry to another. And so, without our knowing how old the lovers are nor how long their relationship lasts, Revaz gives a far more realistic sense of time--and hence of what takes place in the novel's time-span-- than an ordinary writer would.

And as for engaging the reader's emotions, Revaz doesn't try to, never mind trying to engage his sympathies. Her tone is detached, her style flat and rather conversational, and neither of the main characters is except superficially attractive. In fact we learn very little indeed about Efina, and that only obliquely. (As well, it's so bloody refreshing to read a novel whose author doesn't buy into that Mars/Venus nonsense: Efina devotes as little thought to the child she lost/handed over as T does to his children. Efina moves as blithely from one bed, one affair, to another as T. Not a chance here of one whinging about inability to bear children or the other about being unable to live up to his father's ideal of masculinity, etc. etc.)

I've linked on main page to a review making some interesting points about Revaz's style; unfortunately I found it only after reading the book, so I don't know how well the translation reflects the original. I do know that Efina left so strong an impression that it will be lurking at the back of my mind for some time to come.