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"Is it always the same story, then? Somebody loves and somebody doesn't, or loves less, or loves someone else. Or someone is a good soul and someone a villain. And there are just these episodes, anecdotes, places, pauses, hailings of cabs, overcomings of obstacles, or instances of being overcome by them, illnesses, accidents, recoveries, wars, desires, welcomings, rebuffs, baskings (rare, not so long), pinings (more frequent, perhaps, and longer), actions, failures to act, hesitations, proliferations, endings of the line, until there is death. Well, no. I have a wonderful, fond memory, about love and trust and books."

How could you not fall in love with a book like that?

The blue-est book that I have ever read. Blue in all its variations. The blue of melancholy and the blue(s) of jazz. The ominous blue of dusk and the luminous blue of dawn. The blue of veins which, through a stunning trick of light, hides the sensual, bloody red of life.

How else to tackle heartbreak but sideways? An evocation of grief through the depiction of places, homes, foreign lands, familiar vistas and nightmarish nights that never seem to end on the other side of the world. Landscapes and dislocation as the rugged geographies of the heart.

We all know these frail, elegant, intelligent, sensitive, quick-witted and impossibly neurotic women who simply cannot choose between the ardent life of love and the cold facts of reality. Renata Adler knows them well. And what a superb work of art this is.