I spent a block of last summer reading and rereading celebrated Oulipian writer Anne Garréta’s delirious satire In Concrete, in the crackling English translation by Emma Ramadan. In Concrete is a novel that tells its story through puns that first bump up against each other, then melt and flow into trickles, rivulets, streams, creeks, and floods. Wild, yes. The nonstop hallucinatory allusive language sparked any number of interesting connections to other works, not all of which I could include in my review, published by the nice folks at Los Angeles Review of Books, but I did manage to discuss, or touch upon, Garréta’s first and most famous novel, Sphinx, as well as Ovid, Edgar Allen Poe, William Samuel Becket, and James Joyce, along with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Camus’ The Fall.
I hope you enjoy this review and that it inspires you to read both In Concrete and Sphinx, and any of the other works that showed up at the party.
brendanriley2024 