Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge

Unforgiving Years follows a Soviet spy of the first generation -- someone who was part of and believed in the revolution -- in the period leading up to and during World War II. We first meet Daria in Paris in 1937 where she has been tasked with bringing back D., a friend and comrade who is about to slip away to America. Her failure gets her sent to remote Kazakhstan for four years, and it's on the day of her departure from there that the book picks her up again. Germany has invaded Russia and she's brought in as a translator to gather information from captured German soldiers. The descriptions of life in Leningrad in winter during the war was bleak. I got cold reading it. When the book begins again for the third time, we are in Berlin in the last weeks before and leading up to the Allied arrival there. Daria is working undercover as a Latvian nurse committed to Nazi cause. This was the longest section and the hardest to follow. In the confusion of the war's end, Daria decides not to go back to Russia and with her last false passport and last money boards a Swedish ship bound for New York. She looks for D. in Brooklyn and then Virginia and finally finds him in Mexico where he's been living quietly on a coffee plantation for close to a decade. But Stalin's reach is wide.

It always interests me when I find echoes of things I've read recently in unrelated books. I suppose proximity is the key. Similar themes and ideas and concepts must come up across tons of books, and only when I read them in close proximity do I notice the unexpected resonance. So, in Unforgiving Years, I was surprised to find a passage that contained echoes of Outline. (I was less surprised to find passages that reminded me of In the Night of Time, which I am still in the midst of reading. These two books inhabit the same world for a brief period in 1937 Paris. D. from Unforgiving Years and Ignacio Abel from In the Night of Time could have left for New York on the same boat from France.) Anyway, Outline...

Daria is a good operative, but she keeps a journal:

A curious document, this journal, whose carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes [OUTLINES, hm??] of people, events, and ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because -- since it could be seized -- it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a single unmistakable strand of the past.... 

The construction of this featureless record, similar to a thought puzzle in three dimensions turned entirely toward some undefinable fourth dimension, had furnished her with an exhilarating occupation.

This journal comes up a few times over the course of the book and what it described reminded me so much of Outline, a book defined by what's absent from it.