Writing about love may lend itself to narrative (desire reaching for its object, conflicts between lovers, etc), but it can also be a gathering of the shards that stick in your mind. In this book, which recounts the first few years of her relationship with her husband Innocenzo and their final months before his death, Lalla Romano offers shards of startling beauty (a couple that stayed with me: a violet dress the color of a bruise, a line of sparrows dead in the snow). Despite Romano’s relatively straightforward prose style and universal themes (love and death), I also sometimes experienced her writing as inaccessible, even cryptic. Not in a bad way, but in a way that reminded me of something I once heard from a professor, to the effect that intimacy cannot exist without the possibility of nondisclosure/withholding.