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“... a warm reception in France when The Patagonian Hare was published three years ago by Gallimard; Philippe Sollers called it a ‘metaphysical event’. It’s an unbridled piece of self-celebration, dictated to his assistant editor at Les Temps modernes in what Lanzmann calls his ‘naturally epic’ style. There is a lot of name-checking, but no real ...”

“... on a Winter’s Night a Traveller), Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) and, later, Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Tom McCarthy.† In 2001 he published a sort of spy-thriller, a nouveau nouveau roman set in a ravaged postwar Berlin, but its title, La Reprise – ‘resumption’, ‘repetition’, even ‘rerun’ – captured all too well the ...”

“... heart of nature. It’s as though Ishmael’s narrative voice had dropped us deep into virgin forest, where the first sign of the Captain will be a distant clinking of hammers as the track-laying advances. Then, sure enough, the fulmination of the pistons. Ahab himself uses the railroad metaphor in Chapter 37: ‘The path to my fixed purpose is laid with ...”

“... into exercising his conjugal duties; followed by a bed-switch involving more dupery (taken from Philippe de Laon’s One Hundred New Tales); followed by a moralité about a vengeful wife who murders and dismembers her husband (by François de Rosset). A more refined example of romance (a cloudy category), from a later century, Isabelle de Charrière’s ...”