The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Aminadab, by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Jeff Fort
reviewed by Jason D. Fichtel

Maurice Blanchot. Aminadab. Trans. and intro. Jeff Fort. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2002. 199 pp. Paper: $22.00.

It is only within the last ten to fifteen years that Maurice Blanchot’s work has found its way into English translation, and he still remains relatively unknown. One of the most important authors of fiction and theory, Blanchot’s work continually challenges the limits of form and language, continually forces us to question what we know and how we put that knowledge (if it in fact exists) into a language that always resists us. Aminadab, the last of Blanchot’s narrative works to be translated into English, now allows us to view his work in its entirety. Written in 1942, Aminadab is Blanchot’s second novel, and in it he leads us on a journey with his protagonist, Thomas, as he makes his way through a bizarre boardinghouse. Believing a woman has gestured for him to enter, Thomas quickly becomes lost in the house’s multitudinous interior spaces, and he encounters a range of grotesque characters along the way. Clearly Blanchot means for us to see the novel as an allegory, but this novel—perhaps more than his other fictional work—holds together as a “novel.” In Blanchot’s other work, the line between the fictional and the theoretical is far less distinguishable (The Step Not Beyond comes most readily to mind). As with other translations of Blanchot, this edition from the University of Nebraska Press includes an excellent introduction by Jeff Fort. Nebraska has been at the forefront of bringing Blanchot’s work into English translation (along with Stanford UP, among others), and this volume, with Fort’s introduction, joins earlier translations by Ann Smock of The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster as some of the most important work on Blanchot in English thus far.