[In The Taxi two] children, brother and sister, sixteen and fourteen respectively, decide, one day on a merry-go-round on the boulevard de Clichy, to take three months of lessons in sex from a pimp and a prostitute, and then to dedicate themselves to each other for one whole day, in a taxi driving around Paris. The book is composed of their dialogue on this day.

The point, I take it, beyond the trickery and dainty pornography (incest thrown in for those who like their vicarious kicks lightly spiced), is a gamble with language: you speak the unspeakable, you have two characters talk when what they are up to is seemingly beyond talk. Indeed, the book is all talk. The children lapse into significant silences now and then, while they get down to other things, but they are out of them like lightning. There is something desperate here, which...