Bardo or Not Bardo
By Antoine Volodine.
Translated by J.T. Mahany.
Open Letter. 165 pp. Paper $13.95.
I cannot think of any other writer whose work, taken as a whole, is as strange and hermetic and gloriously, hilariously, painfully appropriate to the unparalleled shittiness of our times as that of Antoine Volodine. Or, I should say, of Volodine and his familiars, the multifold mad, hunted, imprisoned, tortured, dreaming, doomed, dying, and frequently dead writers who appear in the pages of his books and who count him among their number, a narrator no more or less fictional than any other.
His confederates include Maria Henkel, author of A Very, Very Artificial Insemination and The Right to Worms, among others; Irina Kobayashi, author of On the Correct Use of the Guillotine at…