The past few days - in case you've been wondering - have been given over to parcelling up the Fullcrumb series (the Post Office being shut has meant I've had to make cardboard packs), wondering what to do next and reading Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris.

E.B. and I have our 'history' - not that I am an avid fan or have read everything she's written. It's more her books have coincided and - as during the past few days - I find sentences, scenes, setting off chimes. She's the kind of author who understands the interweaving of life and writing, of how books get under the skin. How, on opening an old paperback the eye is arrested by an inscription, dated with precision, and a postcard which falls from the pages to the floor.

Thus, Leopold:

Getting up and pushing back the chairs, he began to pace the salon, with his eyes shut, pressing the empty envelope to his forehead as he had once seen a thought-reader do.

Or, looking out onto a drab Friday morning I find:

It grew colder; the season had lost its way. May is seldom quite up to time; this year there was a grey chilly pause ...

Then there are the disconcerting assertions that seem to slice through to the truth of something:

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

I admire, too, the way she prises apart a moment - 'Your mother is not coming; she cannot come' (p66) - repairing the temporal wound on page 191. The intervening pages - 'The Past' - focus on Karen (the mother's) life ten years before leading to conception of the child. 'I should see the hour in the child' - sentences like these linger.

"The non-poetic statement of a poetic truth" is, of course, E.B.'s famous dictum for the kind of novel she's attempting. Certainly it can be seen at work here.

Goodbyes breed a sort if distaste for whoever you say goodbye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again. Any other meeting will only lead back to this. If today goodbye is not final, some day it will be; doorsteps, docks and platforms make you clairvoyant ...

She feels objects and rooms - I'm reminded of Rilke here - as in this sequence from Part Two:

It is a wary business walking about a strange house you know you are to know well. Only cats and dogs with their more expressive bodies enact the tension we share with them at such times. The you inside you gathers up defensively; something is stealing upon you every moment; you will never be quite the same again. ... To come in is as alarming as to be born conscious would be, knowing you are to feel; to look round is like being, still conscious, dead: you see a world without yourself ... (p77)

And there's this:

Blurs and important wrong shapes, ridgy lights, crater darkness making a face unhuman as the moon, Mrs Michaelis, like the camera of her day, denied. She saw what she knew was there. Like the classic camera, she was blind to those accidents that make a face that face, a scene that scene, and float the object, alive, in your desire and ignorance. Nowadays a photograph is no more than an effort to apprehend. (p.118)

And plenty more besides.

So if you've not read this novel - or E.B. for that matter - it's worth a few afternoons of your time.