The challenges for reading are accordingly formidable. Wh...

The challenges for reading are accordingly formidable. Whole sentences hang uncertainly in the void; snatches of unattributed dialogue gesture inconclusively towards scenes or situations that are at best conjectural; and a plethora of unfinished, incomplete, or otherwise interrupted phrases grope for an elusive main clause that might allow them properly to begin or to end. There is likewise a frequent paucity of finite verbs and a corresponding proliferation of enigmatic nominative clauses bereft of temporality, mood, transitivity, or syntactic hierarchy. Names too are conspicuous by their absence, and seem to have been supplanted almost everywhere by a series of mysteriously undefined third-person singular or plural pronouns, while elsewhere words collide, qualify or disqualify each other, or turn back on themselves, generating numerous paradoxical formulations at the very limit of intelligibility.

Leslie Hill on The Step Not Beyond, from his Maurice Blanchot and Fragmentary Writing