Derrida & Education Book

Bleak and perfectly ordered, the second part of my aptly gray-soaked commute this morning with Young Lions. This follows Redonnet's earlier Hotel Splendid in its rhythmic continuance against despair, but simultaneously depicting harsher stabs of reality along with brighter-burning guiding images and actions that approach an obscure symbology. At the same time, this is a little closer to the systems-level view of later Redonnet. In its ability to draw on all these angles of her work together, it's one of her finest, maybe my favorite besides the expiring noir of Nevermore. The story concerns a young girl who, having known only a lapsed rectory where she cared for an ailing priest, finds work in the only other inhabited bit of her remote valley-home, a dancehall. At the same time, she embarks on a "personal project" of a hallucinatorily macabre nature. All rendered in a clipped, minimalist prose that leaves plenty of space to seize the imagination, and somehow manages to be extremely sad despite its affectless intonations.

Here's to hoping that Redonnet's most recent two longer novels will see an eventual translation...