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Translated from the French, this bold yet subtle probing into one woman’s psyche serves as allegory, satire and social critique. Aline has stifled the more irreverent and forceful parts of her nature all her life, conforming to the demands her kindly yet rigid mother and indifferent father have set upon her.

The author widens her net to show how many people smother parts of their inner selves to deal with demanding parents and the world at large. Aline’s situation is by no means unique or uniquely French. No doubt many women will nod to themselves as they read how she stopped behaving in a rough-and-tumble manner, shut off sharp opinions or placidly accepted dull company to please a stalwart boyfriend with whom she’s endured a ten-year-old affair.

The novel shuffles giddily among the viewpoints of three main characters: Aline who becomes more and more aware of a void opening in her mind; Lucien Leftène, his mind quickly snuffed out by the invading piece of Aline’s psyche and the narrator, whose vacillating POV shifts us between these two and the inner part of Lucien that calls itself Orlanda.

Throw in a nosy neighbor, a gay lover who fights against loving someone he fears is only a temporary fancy, a needy ex-girlfriend, an alcoholic mother, intensive students and a Chekhov’s gun and we see a complex web that would make this a fine French farce if it weren’t a sublime tracing of a woman coming to terms with the fiercely repressed parts of her soul. But perhaps it’s both?

This is a novel that can support multiple interpretations, making it something to savor, linger over and re-read.