[Figes's] artistic roots, like her personal ones, are Continental, and the influence of Expressionism is evident in her work, but it is also possible that she is one of the few English writers to have learned from the nouveau roman. Nelly's Version is an easier novel than [many of this type] … because it possesses a more coherent narrative structure, but by describing everything from the position of a middle-aged woman who is almost completely cut off from her own past and who is therefore without memories, Eva Figes sometimes renders her narrator's observation of the world with a cinematic objectivity not unlike that of the nouveau roman. In the two Notebooks that constitute the novel, the narrator, who calls herself Nelly Dean …, records scenes and events, including apparently insignificant details, with unusual precision, and the effect of this technique is to strip perceived reality of its habitual and...