The Young Man

Sometimes books you read make themselves into pairs, but rarely as neatly as these two did for me: two very slim books, the latest by Nobel laureates who each turned 83 last year, and each told by a woman in middle age about an affair with a man named in the title. From those similarities, though, they become almost opposites: Ernaux's memoir recalls her own affair, proudly hungry, with a man young enough to have been her son, while in Coetzee's novel, a married Spanish woman is pursued, against her bemused reluctance, by a Polish concert pianist old enough to be her father. Each book is spare and exact and insightful enough on its own to set up reverberations inside its tiny space; set next to each other, they echo back and forth almost infinitely.