[Le sourd dans la ville may be Marie-Claire Blais's] most difficult book yet. Couched in a convoluted style, with minimal punctuation (there are fewer than a dozen periods in this single-paragraph text), this novel is a dark meditation on suffering and especially death through the interposition of the kinds of unusual characters we have come to associate with Blais's fiction.

In this her fifteenth narrative Blais … constructs an intertwined, unbroken monologue shared by a half-dozen characters who appropriate segments of it an uneven intervals. Consciousnesses appear, disappear and reappear without warning. It is readily clear that they are all prisoners of an overpowering fate which renders their feeble agitations useless. Florence, the most introspective of them all, senses the repetitiveness of things and the oppressiveness of a life in which all has been decided for us, in which our sometimes vaunted freedom does not exist. While some, such...