You shall be made sleepless even as you are left sightless. While you're penetrating the darkness, you'll penetrate into the night, getting in deeper and deeper, your already failing memory growing proportionally weaker as -- at the end of a long lethargy -- you become conscious of your condition. (How will you tell day from night?)

Insane and Incredible. A bed-bound dying blind man regresses through memory and personal geography and vestigial sex drive, tormented by the doctor who sustains him -- at the price of his skin and tattoos upon death -- haunted recollection of a face without a name, and the ambiguous advances of the girl in the next appartment. Rendered with extreme kinetic elegance via breathlessly fractured six-voice stream-of-consciousness and jarring, ever-surprising typographic effects. All of which adds to, rather than distracts from, the story (ie. Not gimmicks!). And bleak as its circumstances may be -- pain and mortality are central here -- it's also absurd and funny in that emergent Joycean way: lost in swirl of words, you are suddenly aware that what you are reading has actually become hilarious without your being immediately aware.

It's also worth noting that this manages that excellent post-modern trick of being simultaneously overwhelmingly smart and surprisingly engaging, full of weird lurid detail. Maybe the most experimental novel I've ever encountered, but utterly successful even so. Even if any reading of it may only be an invitation to much more unpacking and re-reading.

Anyone know if any other Roche novels ever made it into English?