The Last Man

Synopsis

"Blanchot, eminent author of many volumes of fiction and criticism (Death Sentence, The Gaze of Orpheus), ranks among French practitioners of the "anti-novel," which challenges and dismantles the usual storytelling conventions. Three anonymous, phantom-like people—two men and a woman—drift and muse in the game rooms, corridors and piano alcove of a seaside hotel or sanitorium. The narrator, a newcomer, loves the young woman. Much of the time these two converse, exploring their existence (or non-existence) and their relationship to a professorial man who is "not very old yet strangely ruined.