The narrator recalls the friendship that binds Clemence while traveling by train to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal in search of a friend, Gyl, who is also a former lover, and it no longer new for six months. On the train, she "met" a certain Igor, a meeting that is not really because there is no other exchange that looks, and cabbage soup Igor offers by Anne way of the cook of restaurant car. Igor sharing the cabin Anne with four other travelers and interpretation Anne made these few days spent with Igor in the same compartment responsibility of hysterical delirium. Igor would be his "guardian angel" ... and she would recognize her back among thousands of others, because that's mostly what she looked back during the nights of this long journey, the back of an Igor asleep on berth facing his. Igor brings nothing to the story, if not an anthropological key or Russian folk. Similarly Anne will meet with Boris in Irkutsk is also an empty meeting of sense. The reader ends up saying that if Gyl went so far, in deep Siberia, where also the Decembrists were exiled by the Tsar in 1825 was that he wanted to get away as possible from the narrator, of boredom she carries within her, boredom and especially the lack of life, to want to live. This is not a depression: the narrator 'lives by intermediate ", through the people she meets, through the lives of these people, she imagines lives (Igor, Boris) or is told ( Clémence).
Thus the life of Clémence is paralleled with that of the narrator. Clemence has lived a great love, Paul, murdered during the Second World War. She then had several men but never married. Clémence is a former milliner and the author gives him a hand "free-but-not-officially-adapted-to-life-of-Coco-Chanel" that does not escape the reader. Anne read him, especially portraits of heroic women, Olympe de Gouges, Milena (the muse of Kafka), Marion du Faouët, with an emphasis on the crossing by swimming in the Moldau by Milena in his desire not be late for an appointment in love, which becomes too obvious key to the last hour of Mercy, a victim of Alzheimer's disease and committed suicide, throwing himself into the Seine as Milena in Moldova before the return of Anne of its artificial journey to Siberia.
The book vaguely reminiscent of Simonetta Greggio, The sweetness of men in this dialogue between an older woman, a little unusual, that loved and lived freely without conventional fasteners, and a younger woman, or as in Anne eve of entering a sterile maturity (it is too late to have children she did not want younger), undermined by the anxiety of old age and death. This fear of the inevitable change in his body becomes a maddening refrain and the reader has a terrible urge to say, "Enough whining! There are three lines worse than the world around us! "; or, as Bossuet, the lecture: "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity! ".
As Constance in La Douceur des Hommes, Anne is an avid traveler and mentions its various trips even though it is on the train to Irkutsk, but there the similarities end. Because the book Simonetta Greggio exudes tenderness while that of Michèle Lesbre proves a breviary of narcissism and introspection, a "book of regrets," a waste of time for the reader who still wonders what criteria judged these 138 pages newsworthy ...
Is it a new literary trend that anguish of menopause by baby boomers who experienced their best year in 1968, as Anne in The red couch? Or should we see a reconciliation of generations, the necessary dialogue between women finally returned, among those facing old age and death in the face, philosophically, as the cliché that with age comes wisdom and those who are still afraid?
