He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters - a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls 'Mygale', after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, doomed to meet their fate.

    Written, in a sense, for her husband—acclaimed novelist, poet, and mathematician Jacques Roubaud—Alix’s Journal straddles the gap between French and English, poetry and prose, the tragic and the comic, the profound and the quotidian. Alix’s idiosyncratic and revealing work gives us access to a singular consciousness, one that was profoundly influential on her husband’s subsequent works, in style as well as content. The notebooks center on themes of love, marriage, photography, addiction, and death, and include examples of Alix’s photographic work, whose strangeness and poignancy is enhanced by its juxtaposition with her plans for and interpretations of it.From Alix’s Journal:You left yesterday morning, and last night I got drunk by nine. I didn’t walk straight on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, where I went to post my first letter. At ten o’clock I collapsed dead drunk. I woke at three and read what Nigel Nicholson wrote his parents, and read Jacques Roubaud in Change (a poem about water similar to Hockney’s distortions). I asked myself why I abuse myself in this manner when I am loved and really must keep alive; why do I get drunk on an empty stomach? why do I drug myself with sleeping pills? why do I smoke?     looking after oneself.I had things to do today.To fall asleep like everyone else, etc., to lead a simple regular life. To fall asleep likeeveryone else, that is what I want.

    Pascal Quignard recently received the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for his work. In ON WOODEN TABLETS, Quignard takes on the persona of a fourrth century Roman Patriarcian Matron who writes notes on wooden tablets, somewhat in the manner of Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book. She notes erotic souvenirs, jokes, scenes that have touched her, but also accounts and lists of things to do. For twenty years, "Apronenia Avitia" keeps this journal without mentioning, except in passing, the ruinous events she witnesses: the Roman Empire is crumbling, invaded by the "Barbarians" from the North as well as infiltrated from within by the Christian "party." Perhaps she does not see. Perhaps she does not want to see. Translated from the French by Bruce X.