‘I write about families,” Natalia Ginzburg said, “because that is where everything starts, where the germs grow.” The French-born writer and musician Alba Arikha clearly agrees, and has set her brilliant third novel firmly within the crucible of two families: the one her narrator is born into and the one she makes herself as an adult. The narrator is Clara, who, at the start, is a 16-year-old living in Paris and shares some biographical details with her author. (But not the fact her godfather was Samuel Beckett and she was named after his poem Alba.)

In her teenage years, Clara’s life is thrown into chaos when her father relocates their family to New York for a new teaching position. She resists the change and expresses her frustration, but things become even more complicated when she meets the family who previously lived in their new home. Clara becomes infatuated with their son, Alexander, and the brief time they spend together leaves a lasting impact on her life.

During her adolescence, from being sent away to a boarding school (“I choose to despise it”) to coming back home, she consistently longs for Alexander. Arikha effectively conveys the intense and limited aspect of a crush (“In my room, I engage in numerous hypothetical conversations with Alexander and, thankfully, I emerge victorious in every argument”), where Alexander becomes an unattainable standard because he is not constrained by reality.

Clara’s family may find happiness living in New York, but she does not share the same sentiment. Her father believes that it is easier to practice Judaism in the city, but Clara is surprised to learn that being a Jew can still be challenging. She struggles with the dissonance between her beliefs, passions, and surroundings. Alexander will revisit Clara’s story later, but for now, she ends up marrying a different man. Her father is pleased with this choice and has always favored English men.

We must stop there for fear of spoiling the story, but in a sense that doesn’t matter anyway. Two Hours doesn’t do much new in terms of plot – young love lost, the trials of marriage and parenthood – but it does it all exceptionally well, with a rigour to the prose that recalls Rachel Cusk and an honesty – so clear it burns – that is reminiscent of Tove Ditlevsen’s great autobiographical trilogy.

The book spans nearly four decades in just 160 pages, showing great breadth and detail. The latter part of the book is filled with significant events, such as a parental crisis and the possibility of infidelity, that are so powerfully portrayed that I had to pause and catch my breath. While Clara may not always be likable – she is unaware of her own privilege and can be critical of others (she deems her husband’s alopecia patch “disgusting”) – her deeply personal story creates a strong connection between the reader and herself.

Two Hours is an impassioned account of the change we undergo as life pummels us – or, as Clara puts it, “the collision between my life story and the one I had imagined for myself”. To go back after the end, with everything she has been through, and see again her innocence and optimism at the start of the book, is heartbreaking. And if the end felt a bit too sudden to me, that’s mainly because I would have been happy to keep reading for ever.

Source: theguardian.com