Mark wrote: "Excellent review Ilse, it sounds like there's a lot of food for thought here, as themes involved would touch many of us. One thing many of us in the so-called West have trouble understanding is how..."

Ongoing Covid restrictions, reduced air and freight capacity, high volumes and winter weather conditions are all impacting transportation and local delivery across the globe. Jan-Maat wrote: "It sounds as though this would have been a good fit with the woman destroyed collection, I wonder why she dropped it? Too close to home? too political? We’re monitoring as best we can – their strategic posture. So if we have to, we can alter ours. We’ve seen no indication that that’s required right now.”

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You wonderfully capture why I liked reading her so much when I was young, to learn from the not exactly young, looking for a compass, or several, to navigate through life, discovering possible lives to live - I wasn't much interested in reading about characters of my own age. Thinking of another posthumously published novel, Les inséparables, about her friendship with Zaza and their youth, the voices of the younger characters sounds almost as serious as the less and more experienced ones…some are born an old soul?

interesting that she didn't publish it at all in 1965, in France, she would have been ahead of the rest in being disillusioned by Moscow only to be vindicated by 1968, perhaps her virtue of loyalty was too strongly developed? ;) Ilse wrote: "It is fascinating to read which choices artists and intellectuals made at that time, I wasn't aware of Yves Montand's, an event worth exploring further ( and so you guide me to another book, Mila Oiva's Yves Montand in the USSR: Cultural Diplomacy and Mixed Messages" She kept from him certain moods, some regrets, some little worries; doubtless he. too. had his own little secrets. But, by and large, there was nothing that they did not know about each other.

Perhaps this is due to the undercooked feel that pervades this story. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this was an earlier draft or version of the story that did get included La Femme Rompue. La “bufera fumosa” che destabilizza Nicole e André è segno di cambiamento ineluttabile, di differenze in atto, che preludono a domande nuove.