The principal hallmarks of Echenoz’s style are his laconism, his dry wit, and the precision with which he chooses words and images. Each of his novels puts pungent and multilayered ironies into play, complementing and destabilizing one another simultaneously, and consequently demanding that the reader remain very much on the alert. These are not books to be read in a hammock on balmy summer afternoons. Despite that, Echenoz has also become recognized as one of the best storytellers among the “serious” novelists of his generation. Beginning to write when the very idea of plot in the novel was a bitterly embattled one, Echenoz has shown that an attention to novelistic intrigue is by no means incompatible with an experimentalist impulse. Quite to the contrary in fact, plot drives these texts in the first instance, and thus enables other kinds of innovations on the level of technique and theme.

~ Reading Jean Echenoz