Aminadab

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Aminadab

Maurice Blanchot
Translated and with an introduction by Jeff Fort

French Modernist Library Series

200 pages

Paperback

June 2002

978-0-8032-6176-1

$22.00 Add to Cart

About the Book

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.

Author Bio

Maurice Blanchot is one of France's leading authors of fiction and theory, including The Most High and Awaiting Oblivion, both available from the University of Nebraska Press. Jeff Fort is a lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Southern California and has translated Blanchot's "The Instant of My Death" for Conjunctions.

Awards

2002 French-American Foundation Translation Prize, sponsored by the Florence Gould Foundation and the French-American Foundation, fiction category co-winner

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