Dan Franck

"Elisabeth Sifton books."Includes index. Bibliography: p. 405-440.

Already an international literary sensation, and translated into eleven languages, Dan Franck's superbly elegant novel is both a microscopically observed, day-by-day account of a marriage going unexpectedly awry and a portrait of a generation whose young ideals - nurtured in the liberating political turbulence of 1968 France - fade as its members edge warily into their forties. Offering a bittersweet commentary on marriage and morals in the nineties, Separation is also the story of one man's obsession - with his wife, with the life they lead together, and with the children they raise together. And it is the story of his passionate desire - and nearly crippling inability - to prevent any of it from slipping away. It is also - somewhat ironically - deeply romantic, and one of the most luminous portrayals of women in recent fiction. Confronted with the devastating reality of his wife's infatuation with another man and the prospect of being separated from his two young sons, the narrator seeks comfort and solace by scribbling notes of his daily experiences, and in conversations with friends (mostly women) who pour out advice to him. They encourage the narrator, who is a novelist and screen-writer, to organize his notes into a document, and he finds himself writing a novel - this novel - in which he treats a white-hot emotional situation with an almost shocking coolness, and from a startling distance. None of the characters have names, and the style with which they are described is deliberately austere . Separation speaks to an entire generation of people looking over their shoulders and attempting to determine, each in his or her own fashion, what went wrong with their lives - and why. They discover - as does the narrator himself - that sometimes a final, irrevocable rupture is precisely what it takes to do the one thing they never learned to do before: grow up.

My Russian Love is a sort of literary miracle: a tiny, less-than-200-page tale of two cities - 1970s Paris and Leningrad - that nevertheless achieves epic status by virtue of its passionate emotionalism between two young people: a young French film student, and a Russian woman with a tortured past. My Russian Love opens in the present as Luca, a successful forty-year-old filmmaker is returning to Paris from the newly renamed St. Petersburg, where he intends to shoot a film based on a short story by Pushkin. In the dining car of the train, five tables in front of him and across the aisle, he sees a woman make an unusual gesture, tossing her hair back and putting her palm to the back of her neck in pain. The gesture shocks him, awakening a twenty-year-old memory he had thought buried forever. Before he can react, the girl rises from the table and disappears. The memory is of a girl named Anna, the great love of Luca's youth, and the rest of the novel is a braid woven of two strands: a recounting, in passionately intimate detail, of how Luca and Anna met, fell in love, and were separated; and the story of Luca's increasingly desperate attempt to find the girl he glimpsed on the train. Despite its simplicity of style, My Russian Love is a complex, seamless story spanning a generation, effortlessly switching locales between St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York, where it arrives at its shattering conclusion.