French novelist, critic, and philosopher Maurice Blanchot has, in recent years, becomes the subject of increased interest among readers of modern European fiction and critical theory. His previous works that have appeared in English are Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day, The Gaze of Orpheus, The Space of Literature, Vicious Circles, and When the Time Comes.

Written by one of the most widely-studied of contemporary French writers, La Dernier Homme is an austere, intriguing work of nontraditional fiction that explores the distance between desire and its attainment. The story unfolds in the form of an interior monologue at once forbidding and compelling. In what seems to be a sanatorium near a mountain, from twhich the sea is visible as a narrow horizon, several nameless and faceless people spend their evenings together in ground floor rooms, gambling and talking. Among them, one man often sits aprt, he is called "the last man."

Reserved, shy, hesitant, childlike, and gravely ill, he attracts the attention of a young woman who has been in the place so long that she barely remembers the city in which she was raised. She calls him "the professor" and listens eagerly to his detailed descriptions of his own home, ordinary as it is. A special bond forms between the two, arousing jealousy and envy in the woman's lover, who is the narrator. The lover would like to draw her away, not only from "the professor," but also from the institution itself, where she seems to feel so comfortable---dangerously comfortable, perhaps. In the end, however, he is powerless to stop her from dying.

In Blanchot's mysterious and elusive book the questions of illness, death, life, and afterlife and how they affect and are affected by thought and memory are explored from so far inside the mind of one thinking, remembering, and loving man that we come to share his agonies as though they were our own.

Written in spare prose, uncompromising in its denial of ordinary expectations of fictional narrative, The Last Man is eerily appealing.