AMINADAB

Blanchot (b. 1907) is a mordant intellectual akin to the late Thomas Bernhard, Beckett, and Kafka, whose increasingly spare fictions (Awaiting Oblivion, English translation 1997, etc.) explore the difficulty and frustration of grasping and communicating meaning in a universe that seems complacently devoid of it. This novel (Blanchot’s second, published in 1942) is a dark allegory whose protagonist Thomas impulsively enters a boardinghouse in a remote village, becomes caught up in the lives of its generic despairing inhabitants, and never reemerges. Aminadab (the name of the figure said to guard the building) is perhaps a variant on the myth of the underworld journey, a gloss on Kafka’s The Castle (with a possible nod toward Mann’s The Magic Mountain as well), and as intermittent hints suggest, a dramatization of the Jews’ experience of ongoing diaspora. More accessible, in any case, than Blanchot’s self-referential and discursive later work, this important publication offers the perfect introduction to an elusive, recondite, and unusually rewarding writer.