Second Star presents a series of keenly-observed vignettes in the true sense of the word - you enter a scene gently and immediately inhabit the small world that Delerm describes - the sense of glasses resting on your face, the feeling of steering a stubborn cart through supermarket aisles. There is an overwhelming sense of familiarity in each of these "literary snapshots" (as the translator calls them), a sense of shared human experience. These are most skillfully presented in the cases where Delerm describes not a physical experience but an emotional one - the delighted surprise of making a connection with a stranger on the Metro, or the hesitant dance of trying to flag a waiter at a busy restaurant.

The closest analog I can recall to Second Star is Karl Ove Knausgaard's recent Seasonal Encyclopedia, which similarly captures closely-observed vignettes. Like Knausgaard's work, however, Second Star comes off wanting. The vignettes are evocative of neither nostalgia nor discovery. Ultimately, because each vignette stands alone, without an overarching theme, I was ultimately left with a lack of finality or closure at the end of the book.