In Alba Arikha’s arresting novella a woman, Clara, examines the fragments of her life. Looking back over 35 years she tries to make sense of her experiences, the choices she made, the things that haunted her. Arikha’s narrative – possibly autobiographical – is wry and evocative, sensitively drawn. Its episodic structure doesn’t detract from its fluidity. Clara’s a flawed but fascinating, relatable character: sometimes despairing, sometimes optimistic that change is possible. Part of that hope’s rooted in memory of the two hours she spent as a teenager with a boy called Alexander. Alexander represents possibility: of love, of meaningful connection, something Clara clings onto throughout her later, difficult marriage.

As time passes, Clara tries to come to terms with her Jewish heritage, and undergoes a period of intense, adolescent rebellion in which she imagines herself transported into the world of Chabrol or Godard, two of the film-makers whose work consoles her. After a brief spell of freedom in a bohemian corner of New York, Clara meets a man and marries him. Later she has two children, becomes a writer, and somehow blanks out the elements of her existence she cannot quite bear, particularly the actions of her increasingly-abusive husband. Until a chance encounter renews the half-buried belief that there’s still time for reinvention. It’s an intelligent, absorbing piece, brimming with arresting images and scenes, Arikha’s approach often reminded me of Natalia Ginzburg’s one of the many women writers referenced here.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

3.5* rounded up. 16 year-old Clara's family move from Paris to Manhattan for one academic year and Clara falls for Alex, the son of the family lending them an apartment, even though she spends only two hours in his company. Despite this, she thinks about him for the rest of her life.

This was beautifully written, in a flat sort of way. It read at times as if it was a translation - not that the language was wrong, more that the narrator didn't think or speak like a native British person, which I suppose she wasn't. There were a couple of comments she made about her marriage which stopped me in my tracks; 'I wish I had known more about him before marrying him'; and her description of realizing she has fallen out of love with him. The language is simple, but somehow I found them very effective. The description of her postpartum difficulties and the reactions of others to them was well done too.

However, I can't give this a higher rating, because I found Clara quite a closed-off protagonist, and then it just ended abruptly.

I’m sorry but I just didn’t get this book. The narrator, Clara is a thoroughly unpleasant, self centred person who we try to follow through her life from teenager to middle age. When I say try, what I mean is the writer jumps around without notice to various timelines and also without any noticeable reason. A two hour meal with another obnoxious teenager apparently is unrequited love, bordering on obsession with the rest of the book filled with me, me, me and more of boring me.

Tracing Clara’s story from her adolescence to her experience of motherhood, and then through to a pivotal bid for freedom, Two Hours is an exceptional novel. Witty, perceptive, and profoundly humane, this is the work of a writer at the height of her powers.