I listened to this on a long drive last weekend. The writing was gorgeous, and some of the sections were interesting, but it didn't hang together as a novel. There was a section where a man goes for a walk and has dinner in a restaurant where he sees parents being horrible to a child, and gets into an altercation with the father. I loved it as a stand-alone piece, but didn't see what it was doing in the middle of this novel, unless I was missing something.
Also, the woman who has the incident with the dogs...if it's so traumatic (and it sounds it) why doesn't she leave France immediately? Why go on another walk, and then buy a house near where it happened.
Good writing isn't enough.