[The day I spent reading Eva Figes's Days] passed extremely slowly. But this was probably in unconscious sympathy with the heroine of the novel, who spends what little life she has in the private ward of a large hospital. Her meanderings, which set the pace let alone the content of the narrative, are couched in Beckett's perpetual present—deriving as they do from the I of a needle: "I merely think this. In actual fact I can only conjecture about what lies beyond the walls of this room. And in the last analysis it does not matter. I no longer allow it to concern me." Luckily for her, but not for us as she roams over her attenuated past like a fly over cold soup….

It is only, of course, in the ruined choirs of Romanticism that a monologue can be found appealing. This happy fallacy has never...