Aminadab

Author's name: Maurice Blanchot

This is a novel shrouded in mystery! Or so most readers familiar with Blanchot's novels would say. And mystery is one of the most important elements driving this novel and revealing its secrets; it is an endless influence, intertwined with a sense of caution.

Amindab is the second novel by the French novelist Blanchot, published in 1942. It appeared just one year after the first edition of his debut novel, Thomas the Enigmatic. Apart from his first novel—which was published in France—Amindab is the last of Blanchot's novels to be translated into English, thus opening up to English readers the opportunity to explore and delve into almost the entirety of Blanchot's creative output.

But the remarkable feature of this literary work is the shift from the narrative style to what Blanchot later called "narrative style"—a term difficult to translate, but whose ambiguity serves its purpose in the case of "stories," and which these later works will not be so heavily influenced by. While not entirely devoid of character- and event-like features, the novel gradually dispenses with all known narrative techniques, and tends steadily toward the strange disappearance of the voice that informs them.