Which came first, words or things? Are your words yours, or someone else's? And what do the Crusades have to do with it? And what do ants have to do with it?
Jean Ricardou has been given something of a bad rap: he's widely seen as a difficult writer, or worse yet, as an intensely serious one. However, he easily sheds this weighty reputation in his
hilariously playful new novel about the notoriously complex world of literary theory. Supplying his readers with everything they need to know to navigate this world, Ricardou uses his own
irreverent interpretation of deconstructive theory to ask questions about language and history, theory and life, and all the intriguing connections between them.
"With remarkable mastery, Jean Ricardou creates a fiction, like those of Borges, causes the conventional foundations of reality to tremble, and that brings with it, through its infinitely reflected simulacra, the collapse of reason beneath the vestiges of a question with no answer."-Alain Clerval
"Ingenious, facetious, . . . and skillfully constructed, it offers its readers the discovery, at once surprising and captivating, of a love affair, conceived in the arcane of language, between narration and fiction, and--why not?--between dreams and realities."-Andr矇 Dalmas
"[Because] of its extreme eccentricity, Ricardou's work sets its own traditions far from the more familiar forms of postmodern fiction." -Tobin Jones
"[Place Names] must be read and experienced rather than talked about."-Leon S. Roudiez
