Aminadab by Blanchot, M;

The world of Aminadab, Maurice Blanchot's second novel, is dark, bizarre, and fantastic. Reminiscent of Kafka's enclosed and allegorical spaces, Aminadab is both a reconstruction and a deconstruction of power, authority, and hierarchy. The novel opens when Thomas, upon seeing a woman gesture to him from a window of a large boarding house, enters the building and slowly becomes embroiled in its inscrutable workings.

Although Thomas is constantly reassured that he can leave the building, he seems to be separated forever from the world he has left behind. The story consists of Thomas's frustrated attempts to clarify his status as a resident in the building and his misguided interactions with the cast of sickly, depraved, or in some way deformed characters he meets, none of them ever quite what they seem to be. Aminadab, the man who according to legend guards the entrance to the building's underground spaces, is only one of the mysteries reified by the rumors circulating among the residents.

Written in a prose that is classical and at times lyrical, Blanchot's novel functions as an allegory referring, above all, to the wandering and striving movement of writing itself.

"Aminadab is a startling provocation, a gauntlet thrown down to the fiction reader—and yet there is no complicated theory or code to be cracked in order to participate in the originality of Maurice Blanchot's 1942 novel. Maurice Blanchot may hardly be a household name in America, but in some circles he is one of the essential writers of the 20th century. . . . Every sentence of Aminadab is an invitation to think, about language, about responsibility, about life. Blanchot's density requires us to slow down our reading; he makes us pause, grow uncomfortable. Yet we are taken by Blanchot's seerlike ability to penetrate to the core of some of the darker aspects of the 20th century."—Thomas McGonigle, Washington Post Book World