In literature and the arts, as in history, the vital process of rebellion and regeneration needs to be activated by cataclysmic events. Just as World War I released the creative energies channeled into dada and surrealism, post-World War II Europe saw a vigorous rejection of narrative conventions dealing with character, time, and space that coalesced in the French New Novel beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. Like the other novelists published by Editions de Minuit with whom he is frequently compared, Robert Pinget found the techniques of the nineteenth-century narrative inadequate to a vision of man informed by the discoveries of Einstein, Jung, and Joyce. He set out in his own way to reconsider and reexpress man's relationship to himself, to the world, and to language.

Praised by his colleagues Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute as a writer's writer; author of a novel described by Samuel...