Awaiting Oblivion

Reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, this novel is set in a sparsely furnished hotel room.and recounts the conversation of a man and a woman waiting for something to happen and trying to remember something that happened.

Kirkus

"Another of Blanchot’s almost-fictions . . . throwing into deliciously baffling high relief the enigmatic condition of a man and woman alone in a sparsely furnished hotel room who try to remember what has happened to bring them there as they apprehensively await whatever will happen next. Their reserved confusion and quiet desperation eventually impress upon them (and us) the realization that imagination (or, if you will, writing) can create reality—and offer the paradoxical solace that seems to rest at the heart of Blanchot’s writing: the sense that even language that expresses meaninglessness can’t help but contain and, therefore, convey meaning."—Kirkus

Maurice Blanchot has been for a half century one of France’s leading authors of fiction and theory. Two of his most ambitious nonfiction works, The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster, are also available from the University of Nebraska Press, as is The Most High, his third novel.

John Gregg is the author of Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression.