However, even with evocation, the differences between the genders were still statistically significant (p = 0.001), the initial gender difference in death talk of 50%30%0% men versus 80% women) before the first evocation-type intervention having decreased to a difference of 32%59%9% versus 91%, respectively) by the end of the first interview.
In London's Olympic year, Zadie Smith's NW (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99) came closest to a full-spectrum capture of the city's kaleidoscopic energies, although even her dynamic, street-smart, immersive prose couldn't quite sustain its inspired first-half evocation of a mixed-up time and mixed-up people.
If there are two common denominators to many choices here, they are: second novels in sequences that somehow manage to be as good as the first; and the evocation of setting.
The first is an evocation of Combray, the village where the narrator, an aspiring writer, grew up ("For a long time I went to bed early…"); the second tells the story of the aristocratic Charles Swann and Odette, the woman with whom he is tormentedly infatuated; the third deals with the narrator's idealised boyhood love for Swann's daughter, Gilberte.
First, a brief evocation of my past: it's 2007.
The end — long seconds of toneless evocation of breathing — was as delicate as music gets.
However, what lingers most vividly in the memory is his affectionate, gently mocking and frequently moving evocation in the first third of the book of a period and a society that, though not long gone, seems now to be from an entirely different age.
That same edge, though, gave Janácek's "Kreutzer Sonata" quartet a special quality, particularly in the heart-rending first movement's devastating evocation of longing and loss.
The movie has a couple of Bergman howlers (such as a noisy owl that presages doom), but its evocation of first love and the long disillusion that follows is possibly without equal in movies, and the relief from melancholy — through dancing, theatre, the masks that reveal the self — builds into an overwhelming accession of bliss.
The book is divided into three unequal sections, the longest one comprising Urbain's experiences in the war, but we are led up to it through the first part, a masterly evocation of the life of the European provincial poor, a world now lost to us irrevocably.
