No recent writing has wrapped me up in its world as much as this short masterwork by French writer Nathalie Leger. That’s all the more impressive because essentially half the book is a fragmented shot-for-shot retelling of the movie Wanda, directed by Barbara Loden. You don’t have to have seen the film for this to work—I hadn’t—because Leger’s writing captures its images in a way that can only be done in writing, the kind that lets you imagine yourself onto the screen, feeling what the character feels. Those imaginative flights have real-world reflections, too, in Leger’s beautifully rendered memories of her mother. It’s one of the most effectively empathetic books I can recall about how art inspires empathy.