Aminadab

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by Maurice Blanchot,

Translated by Jeff Fort

University of Nebraska Press

Due/Published June 2002, 240 pages, paper

ISBN 0803261764

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

Review

“The girl, as if suddenly becoming aware of this expectation, made a quick sign with her hand, like an invitation; then she quickly closed the window, and the room was submerged again in darkness.” -- from Aminadab

Thomas, the protagonist of Blanchot’s strange and gripping novel, accepts the girl’s invitation and enters her house. Once inside, Thomas confronts a bizarre cast of characters and a set of inscrutable rules and regulations. In prose that is classical and at times lyrical, Blanchot creates a dark and cryptic world in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem and where uncertainty mixes with a suffocating atmosphere. Thomas’s quest to find the girl is constantly thwarted by the house’s maze-like structure, bizarre illusions, and his conversations with other inhabitants. Yet, it is not only Thomas who is confused; the other inhabitants, who range from the helpful to the deformed to the depraved, also struggle with the building’s rules and hierarchies. Thomas’s wanderings take him from conversation to conversation, and Blanchot’s characters’ speeches are at once allegorical, lyrical, and enigmatic. Who knows what? Who serves who? Who wants what? are all questions that hang over Blanchot’s second novel (1942), which is now finally available in English. While Aminadab is clearly reminiscent of Kafka’s Castle, it also wrestles with many themes found in Blanchot’s philosophical works – our relationship to the unknown, the nature of language, and the act of writing.

Aminadab also includes Jeff Fort’s illuminating discussion of how the novel relates to Blanchot’s literary essays from the period and the novel’s allegorical nature. Whether or not you are familiar with Blanchot’s philosophy, Aminadab is a compelling and haunting work and should be of particular interest to readers of Kafka.