Whatever answers are to be found lie in the blank space around them, that looming, claustrophobic blankness. Snow. Shame. History. Monstrosity. The steaming, stinking heap of it. Carson lets it answer for itself.

Perhaps, newly attuned to her own insatiable desire to create, she would reach her own form of understanding from the drafts that she would copy out eleven times by hand.

If the act of translation is often reduced to a dichotomy of foreignization and domestication, Dodson’s work is an interrogation; apropos of the book’s slippery relationship to the idea of national identity, of what constitutes the foreign and domestic in the first place.

The most beguiling aspect of My Search for Warren Harding is the way Plunket manages to discount the meaning of romance, literature, and history to such an extent that none much help us read his novel.

In an age where many modern writers strive for profundity in their themes and characters at the expense of formal invention, Queneau's works reminds us that style possesses its own kind of depth. Precision can be a gateway to enlightenment.