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3.5 stars

I have found reading this short novel arguably interesting due to its eighteen three-dot intermissions (. . .) between traditional paragraphs of narratives with generous uses of the pronouns, we, you and I that obviously suggest her writing style. However, it's a bit perplexing when there are two tenses in each paragraph using the same pronoun as we can see from the following:

IT BEGAN WITH THE FEAR.
We'd driven to Quillebeuf, as we often did that summer.
We got there at the usual time, late afternoon. As usual we went for a stroll beside the white rail that runs along the quayside from the church at the entrance to the harbor to the disused path that leads out of it, probably to the forest of Brotonne.

We look at the tanker port on the other side of the river, and at the tall cliffs of LeHavre in the distance, and at the sky. . . . (p. 3)

These two paragraphs have posed a problem related to the sense of time, in other words, she has narrated in the past, past perfect and present tenses in the first paragraph. Then, out of the blue, she starts her second paragraph with the present tense that has since made me keep asking myself why.

And another vividly tense-related problematic paragraph:

We were a long way past the plateau now. Instead of taking the expressway at Pont-Audemer, we'd turned off towards Foulbec and Berville -- we wanted to go past the bay. At Berville we made for what used to be the harbor of Rouen. You come upon the bay quite suddenly. After a lot of little clumps of trees you emerge on what we call the German factory, a huge empty hulk with shattered windows. Tonight the wind isn't whistling through it. We stop. (p. 106)

We understand that the first and the second sentences using 'We' and 'we' that seemingly include the narrator and her companion. But for the following sentence with 'You', I wonder if she means her reader or her companion and why she has switched to the present tense. For immediacy or what?

This was one of the reasons that I couldn't help reading this novel on and off due to her magically veering of alternate tenses at will. However, there're some interesting points worth mentioning as we can see in these three extracts as follows:

Before the succession of ordinary factory shoes they'd found in the shops during the last ten years, she'd had some made to measure in Southampton . . . (p. 76)

Clothes were another thing , but in the long run it all boiled down to the same -- nothing fitted her anymore, and she positively refused to go into a shop. So? So what? So nothing. That's how it was now. . . . (p. 76)

"I don't know if love's a feeling. Sometimes I think it's a matter of seeing. Seeing you." (p. 101)

When I read the first, it reminded me of what I've seen before, that is, made to order so 'made to measure' is another viable usage. While the second suggests a three-word cluster highly conversational, monolog-like; presumably said to herself out of irritation. As for the third, it again reminded me of a song entitled To See You Is To Love You (1952) (). I think the speaker might have heard of the song before; therefore, she tacitly rephrased as if to say, "Seeing you is loving you."

To continue . . .