‘The Life-Writer,’ by David Constantine

Certain novels shock you awake, blotting out external noise, making you thankful you lived long enough to have found them.

Around the time of this novel’s British release, a story from his admired collection “In Another Country” had just been made into a much-praised film (“45 Years,” starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling).

[...] his death launches this novel’s journey: an investigation into his past, which (despite her near-paralyzing grief) Katrin resolves to write.

Though Eric doesn’t survive to complete the tale, “[h]is unfinished narrative at death’s door was unprecedented,” and Katrin seizes her mission: to reconstruct and write what happened.

Through letters and conversations with the intuitive, kind, caring Daniel, Katrin tracks Eric’s first, headlong, “Elvira Madigan”-like affair with Monique, a winsome French artist.

The magic of this novel is that Eric’s story — full of strangeness, beauty, wretchedness, awe — becomes Katrin’s and ours, brilliantly embodying specifics but also a vaster vision of what it means to live, to obey “life’s chief command: become the one you are!”

Readers will be drawn in as if by undertow, sensing something tremendous bearing down, pushing to break through.

Though grief and loss (“an absence as alive as the years of presence were”) are foremost on this novel’s mind, so are friendship, art, language and translation, illness and wellness (“You will always be ill and well, in a continuously shifting mixture”), loneliness and connection (note the novel’s final three words), the chastening mystery of the natural world, the sustaining rewards of an interior life, how the past shapes the present, being and becoming.

The novel’s magnificent payload, reverberating in final pages like a series of thunderclaps, feels profoundly earned.

“[I]t’s ... the love of the beautiful earth and the making of an answering beauty in art and in deeds,” observes Daniel, ... so that men and women will live lives fit to be looked at. ...

At the novel’s outset, a certain crimson pouch filled with “three dozen small thin silver coins” pours its contents “in a glistening slither” from one pair of hands into another, “like a shoal of flashing fish ... with a tinkling.”

The image’s genius is its electrifying sensuality, even while it evokes a far larger, glittering comprehension.