This is the fourth in a series of five novels based on the author’s family. The first book, Fields of Glory, amazed me with its meticulous interweaving of mundane descriptions of family members until slowly the light breaks in and you realize that this is a story of monumental importance.

His second book, of which the New York Times reviewer said “it is clear from the first page that Jean Rouaud is a writer who knows exactly where he is going and how to get there,” focuses on the author’s father. The third book is about the author himself, and this book portrays the mother.

As the portrait develops, you realize why this women has done little more than hover in the periphery of the previous volumes. “She will not read these lines,” For Your Gifts opens, and this becomes a refrain: a lament and an explanation, a prerequisite for the book’s existence.

The impressive thing about this book is that it is sad and touching and only reluctantly recriminating. What difficult person could be more complicated for a son to understand than his own mother? He painstakingly sorts through her past, the circumstances that made her the way she is, the person she must have been before her marriage, how many things she lost and left behind before he ever knew her. It is only then that he approaches the motif that shadows every page of his writing, his father’s death, which left his mother a young widow.

It was hard at first for me to like this book. Rouaud’s tortuous sentences, his unremitting sensitivity to every detail and every possible significance of every combination of details, sometimes tire me. Sometimes I feel like his metaphors are too stetched, but then I realize he could be right. I think his striking comparison of death and grief to birth and infancy may be worth considering.

When the author’s father died suddenly at the age of 41, his mother summoned help by knocking on the wall they shared with their neighbor:

It seems that with her fists beating on the wall she made her first appearance, as if all those years spent taking care of her family were a long gestation, a waiting, so that when the moment came . . . being deprived so long of the weight of speech and remembering the drumbeats on TV that made you hold your breath as death approached, she only had that primitive resource to announce her entrance into the world, as if by this announcement of imminent death, pounding like a tragic funeral drum, she signaled, in a way, her birth.

We think that maybe mourning was an excuse, that she was charged with too heavy a load, that all of her sorrow was not necessarily because of the deceased—that she had to bring to this birth the cries of the newborn, to sort through the tears, and to distinguish the formulaic fear of death from the unformulated wail of life. For she cries, our mother brutally abandoned in the December night, just like the one emerging from the waters who is thoughtlessly plunged into the great bath of nitrogen and oxygen. How do you survive this?

Now, she knows an infant’s fragility. She lost her first child at three weeks. One year could have understandably appeared to her an unattainable horizon. One year, while sudden death prowls and a thousand traps, one year to learn to balance and stand upright, which took our ancestors three million years—one year, for any newborn, is the end of the world. And this silence of hers after the disappearance of our spokesperson, which she only broke to ask us what we wanted to eat . . . This silence that we instantly attributed to the event that left us voiceless—we could certainly blame our mother for not being precocious, but how long does it take a child to express itself correctly? Five years? Six? Ten years before being able to choose the right article and to tell stainless steel from aluminum, white glass from colored glass, cut from molded crystal. That’s exactly how much time she took from her stock of years to rediscover the full use of speech.

Like it or hate it, this is a pretty good example of the way this writer stretches your view of things.

I eventually even began to admire the person he was taking such pains to faithfully present. This power to gain sympathy should not be surprising from an author who brings such humor and generous curiosity to his study of death and loss.

I have learned that the translator of Rouaud’s first three books died about six months ago but maybe this gives you time to catch up on those until they find a translator for this one. ( )

A superb evocation of the heroism of a mostly mute protagonist; a son's moving tribute to his mother's sacrifices. ( )