Stabbing at your keyboard, you will decimate your memories. In Not One Day (2002), which won the Prix Médicis, the unnamed narrator, writing in the second person, issues herself a set of directives-to write five hours every day for a month, each time about a different unnamed woman she has desired or who has desired her: Passing through the entrance of the club, something of my being was lost or absorbed, an inexplicable and immeasurable stripping away that, once I finally ended up on the dance floor, hadn’t left any of me behind except my carnal covering, spurred on only by the rhythmic pulsing of the music.

Set amid a Parisian nightclub fantasia of glitter, noise, and heaving bodies, it is narrated in a formal voice by an erstwhile theological student, now DJ:

Sphinx (1986), her first book, was published in France when she was twenty-three, and of those that have been translated it is the one that most resembles a traditional novel, despite the fact that Garréta never identifies the two main characters’ sex or gender. They are familiar types of stories-love affair, confessional, and family farce, respectively-told in unconventional ways. Three of her novels have been translated into English, all marvelously rendered by Emma Ramadan: Sphinx, Not One Day, and In Concrete. “Fiction is the realm where identities, far from being reinforced, may be displaced.” “The empirical self and the writing (or reading) self are not identical,” she writes. In her 1996 essay “In Light of Invisibility,” she argues that writing fiction allows for a kind of dissembling in which imagining other ways of being is an imperative. “And that is mysterious still,” he continued, “that out of artifice one should touch and stir up what is deepest in one’s soul, one’s heart, one’s memory.” 1 That mystery is a hallmark of Anne Garréta’s writing-a generative balance between artificial formal structures and a (sometimes intense) demand for empathetic imagination. Naipaul admitted that an “artificial, self-conscious” feeling seized him every time he began to write, until “some true impulse” finally made itself known to him.

The straight mind and other essays