René Frégni lived a strange vagabond existence in his youth, deserting from the army and living abroad for years under a false identity. It contrasts strangely with his later life back in France, where he has lived for the last twenty years or more in the little village of Manosque in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence – writing, running workshops in local prisons, thinking back on his travels, and raising two daughters.

This gentle, bittersweet book takes the form of his journals over the space of about a year. It seems to have been prompted by his youngest daughter heading off for university in Montpellier, leaving Frégni all alone; through these journal entries, you come to know the quiet rhythms of his life, rising early, having a coffee in the square, wondering around his empty apartment, observing his neighbours, wondering in the countryside, and helping friends and acquaintances in nearby villages.

Writing novels, he says, allows him to ‘hide, escape, disappear and be everywhere at once’. Whereas in this journal he can be ‘plus intimidé, plus indiscret’. And he is indiscreet: his thoughts are full of longing and awareness of the women around him. I don't know what happened to the mother of his daughters, but it's clear that he's been on his own for some time – the book is infused with a generalised yearning that I would call loneliness, though he avoids the word.

A running subplot, for example, involves the behaviour of the two young women who live in an apartment across the courtyard from him, into whose bathroom, unbeknownst to them, his kitchen window looks (a typical motif in French literature). These sections are a peculiar mix of creepy, erotic, sweet, and sad. These feelings interact in strange ways with his struggle to let go of his daughter Marilou, who used to take up his whole life, and with whom his contact has now been reduced to a few postcards, the occasional weekend meet-up in a restaurant.

Dans les collines de Manosque j'avais été tout pour elle, le soleil, l'insouciance, l'éternité. Dans cet étroit restaurant arabe je n'étais plus que son père.

[In the hills of Manosque I had been everything to her – sunshine, frivolity, eternity. In that little Arab restaurant, I was just her father.]

He is proud of her, and accepts with as good grace as he can manage the student boyfriend who has taken his place as the man in her life. But as he sits in the evening alone, watching the setting sun turn ‘every palmtree to a firework’, it's clear that he misses her very much indeed. ‘C'est beau et difficile de devenir une femme,’ he says. As this book makes clear, the same could be said of becoming a father. ( )