A novel afterlife: play and performance in Jean Echenoz's Au piano.(Critical essay)

In Au piano (2003) Jean Echenoz considers the conventions of novelistic narration and the ways in which literary meaning may be constructed. In particular, he focuses upon the articulation of writer and reader, anticipating the latter's expectations and reconfiguring them in unexpected ways. It is useful to view the manner in which he stages that interaction as a kind of game, organized around the principle of performance, in a cannily doubled and doubly ironic portrait of the writer and the reader at work. The wager in that game is the life--and the afterlife--of the novel…