Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead

A chance encounter leads a man to spend the afternoon with an older woman now a widow who escaped him fifteen years earlier. Neither of them doubts that the day will end in disgust but for one intimate moment each finds a way to overcome mortality.Written in 1969 before Milan Kundera was known to English-speaking readers this story renders male and female characters painful equals and prompted Philip Roth to admire its 'detached Chekhovian tenderness'.