"S/Z" is a nearly unreadable book about reading, a two-hundred-page crawl through a thirty-page story by Balzac…. The reader emerges, as from that machine of Kafka's which engraved commandments upon the transgressor's skin, lexically enriched but lacerated; I have no recollection of any other book ostensibly in the English language which gave me such pains to peruse. Barthes says elsewhere, of good prose, that "it grates, it cuts," and his own is notably abrasive, his vocabulary a gnashing, flashing compound of Greek [and terms lifted from modern linguistics and common words] … recoined with a specific and not easily grasped meaning. His style is dense, terse, nervous, parenthetical, sometimes arch, and faintly insolent. He seems often to be recapitulating something we should have read elsewhere but haven't. He appropriates to the language of literary criticism a certain pseudo-mathematical sharpness. His method, in "S/Z," of moving by crabbed...