description: "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."The ambiguous condition of the three suggests the living death of a shared dream, hallucination or endless wait in limbo, where emotions still have sharp validity. At times the novel has the quality of a musical poem, with themes and variations played on certain calm, space, light, suffering.Reading Blanchot is to submit profoundly and willingly to the disorienting power of language. Written 30 years ago, The Last Man stands as an innovative work of postmodernism."— Publisher's Weekly
language: French
title: Le dernier homme
titlecomplete: Le dernier homme
genres: Fiction, France, Philosophy, French Literature, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 233
publisher: GALLIMARD