Prétextat Tach is an octogenarian writer, as hairless as a fetus, hideously obese, a misogynist, a racist, a xenophobe, a provocateur, and a Nobel Prize laureate in literature. He is also (possibly) dying, having received a somewhat dubious-sounding diagnosis of “cancer of the cartilage,” and a squadron of journalists have descended on his apartment to conduct their final interviews.
The novel is told entirely in dialogue, in the classical sense of the word: two speakers only at a time, the scenes as bare and as back-and-forth as an Abbott-and-Costello routine or a Socratic dialogue. In a series of verbal duels between Tach and a succession of journalists, Tach expounds his philosophy of literature and art. But even as the journalists try to pin him down on firm opinions, Tach runs verbal circles around his interlocutors, never quite giving a firm answer, and certainly never allowing someone to attribute to him any idea resembling cliché.
Tach is withering in his contempt for easy theories of literature. He assails the idea that a writer writes to discover what he is thinking. He criticizes metaphor as “bad faith.” Writing is, according to Tach, the most impudent profession in the world. But this harsh account of writing is connected to an ecstatic opinion of reading. What makes Tach compelling is that, in spite of his odiousness, he has drawn an entire moral universe around his love of literature. ('Love' is, perhaps, the wrong word to use here, 'devotion' a still worse formulation. 'Obsession' gets closer.) It isn't taste that is the highest god in the Tach-iverse, but, in his own words, “la bitte et les couilles,” the instruments of creation.
The Tachian speeches represent two things:
The expression of the real-life Nothomb's most id-borne opinions about literature, declarations that are snarling and martial, assertions that have travelled from gut to gullet without the bureaucratic delay of super-egoic intervention, and
Nothomb's demarcation of the bounds of literature. Theorizing is a young-person's game, and Nothomb is working through her theories via the mouthpiece of Tach.