Two Hours by Alba Arikha review: ‘I read it twice’

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The titular Two Hours occur in the opening pages when Clara, aged 16, and accompanied by her parents and sister, has arrived in New York from her home city of Paris. There she meets Alexander and the intensity of their brief encounter is so transformative that it not only spells first love for Clara but provides a benchmark for her life over the following 35 years.

They coincide at an exhibition opening in a gallery owned by art dealer André and his literary wife Lorna, accompanied by their teenage son, Alexander. For the first time Clara feels “something akin to what I have read about in books. A flutter of the heart.”

Next day and on his way to the airport, Alexander calls in at the opulent apartment generously loaned by his parents to Clara’s family, to collect some books. They continue their literary discussion of the previous evening, exchanging likes and interests, bonding over literature. Clara needs to read Dostoyevsky and Alexander, Jane Austen. Alexander leaves with a lone copy of The Iliad.

It is tempting if – as always – dangerous for the reader to compare the subject with the author. Arikha’s father was the French-Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha; her mother the American poet Anne Attik; and her godfather one Samuel Beckett.

The two share the same cultured and “assimilated” Ashkenazi background as Clara’s own parents (her father an academic, her mother a translator), only more affluent. In America her father declares “it’s easier to be a Jew here”. Clara is “surprised because I hadn’t realised that being a Jew could still be difficult”.

The story gravitates between Clara’s home city of Paris; boarding school in New York; and time spent in Rome and London. Wherever Clara is, Alexander inwardly informs her actions and reactions, dreams and desires. On one occasion she glimpses him, again in New York, lying on the street in apparently desperate circumstances.

Clara’s subsequent lovers, even her violent husband, are measured against the adolescent coup de foudre. Clara’s disastrous marriage – the instability it generates and her inability to protect her two, utterly plausible, perplexed and angry young daughters – is gripping. Her postnatal depression is terrifying.

It is a story relayed with uncommon punctuation, often in paragraphs so slight they resemble verses (among her wide-reaching oeuvre, Arikha includes an extended narrative poem and opera libretti). It is inhabited by associations to words with the prefix ‘in/im’: impulse; initiation; infiltration; intensity. Above all with inhabitation, for as Clara feels herself inhabited by Alexander, their story comes to inhabit the reader. This is truly the only book that I have returned from the last page back to the first, to read all over again.