DUMP THIS BOOK WHILE YOU STILL CAN!

An amusing 1992 metafiction from a member of OULIPO, the experimental fiction “workshop” famed for such practitioners as American expatriate Harry Mathews and Bénabou’s brilliant countryman Georges Perec. Dump This . . . is a novel about the act of reading a book: a text that warns (its reader) the narrator to abandon it; in effect, “talking” to him, while he conveys to us his own interconnected (and increasing) frustrations as reader, writer, and lover of a woman as elusive as the volume that keeps taunting him. It adds up to a delightfully involving game (à la Julio Cortázar and Italo Calvino), replete with mischievous literary allusions—and, beyond that, a provocative analysis of how author and reader conspire to create the experience of perusing and inhabiting a text. Meanwhile, Rendall’s witty and resourceful translation is a rare pleasure unto itself. Great fun.