One of the more important jobs a novelist does—often to the useful discomfort of his readers—is surely to create the moment from inside, vividly, patiently, admitting every ounce of its current ambiguity, so that his sentences read like heart beats. Such a richness of life going on, actually being lived from one word to another, is well approached in "Winter Journey." This is Eva Figes's second novel; I missed the first, "Equinox," but on the strength and sensitivity of her latest work I'd place her immediately as a writer to be watched. She goes beyond gesture to fix the most fugitive movements of existence in a pattern true to themselves. She allows nothing, in a very short book, to distract her attention from what she perceives to be essential. She is a real realist—and offers much that seems threatening to one's necessarily limited experience of...