Echenoz, Jean (b. 1947). French author of six novels published by Minuit: three stories of espionnage and detection, Le Méridien de Greenwich (1979), Cherokee (1983, Prix Médicis), Lac (1989), and two of adventure, L'Équipée malaise (1986) and Nous trois (1992), which combines an earthquake in Marseille and a journey in space. L'Occupation des sols (1985) is a work apart, a 15-page vignette about a father and son and the only remaining image of their dead wife and mother, a psychologically and socially sensitive piece. The plots of the other five are ingenious and intricate, with many characters obliquely introduced, minimally delineated, and brought together by a convergence of chances. These works are never far from pastiche (see the farcical botched denouement of Lac). The writing is taut, economic, and precisely descriptive, and at the same time inventive and alive with neologisms (nouns converted into strong verbs) and syntactic tricks. Humour, and especially irony, abounds.

[Peter Sharratt]

The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.