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. (Kirkus Reviews)
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.
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