Eva Figes demonstrates her intimacy with the dual promise and torment of time on nearly every page of her ambitious and unsettling new novel, "Waking."…

Given the novel's brevity and the unavoidable limitations of its innovative framework, it is amazing that we learn so much about the narrator. Though Miss Figes's prose occasionally sinks into sticky poeticism, her attention to detail never falters. She remembers how a child builds a secret house by drawing the bedclothes over her head and arching her spine….

Even when the heat of a midlife affair dulls the narrator's usual cynicism, her litany of detail lets us see the lurking bitterness that she herself ignores….

The ineluctability of time eventually devastates the narrator. The passing years and the thousands of awakenings to which we are not privy mark her, and she becomes sour. She yearns for the respect and privacy that her family...