It would seem incumbent upon the prospective commentator to begin an assessment of the Dalkey Archive edition of Jean Echenoz's CHOPIN'S MOVE by noting that is serves as a translation of a French novel originally titled LAC. The difference between the two titles is not merely curious, but speaks to two very different, and I believe extremely telling, ways of framing the novel. The novel is itself in the most reductive terms a parody of the popular spy novel, or novels, ubiquitous as these are, focused on matters pertaining to espionage; the English title seems patently to represent a choice that would seem appropriate to an earnest novel of that particular sort. It is not hard to imagine a tawdry paperback called CHOPIN'S MOVE about an enterprising spy named Chopin, rife with predictable titillations and borrowed plot mechanics. The French title, however, if carried over to English more or less as is, would be LAKE. This title tells us far more about the intellectual character of the work in question. The austerity of that title certainly presents us with something elegant and slightly inscrutable. As it appropriate. It also asks to reader to maintain at the forefront of his or her thinking a sense of the natural world against the background of which the novel's frenzied and absurd action is set in motion, the sound and fury ultimately signifying tellingly little. A lake does figure prominently in the novel, sitting there relatively fixed, representing an impassive form of comparative permanence when counterpointed with the transience of baleful human drama. If the title CHOPIN'S MOVE could easily serve a book of innocuous genre-beholden entertainment, the title LAC, especially applied to the actual work in question, speaks to a far higher category of enterprise, thoughtful, ironic, and unmistakably literary as it is. CHOPIN'S MOVE is absolutely a novel of irony, as well as one fundamentally parodic in nature, but its subtlety and unusual tact prevent it from being boisterously declarative in these respects. Its humour is sly, its style smooth and unprepossessing. Its strangeness, perhaps because appropriately muted, is both arresting and exceedingly French. There are no shortage of postmodern American novels that anarchically embed themselves in genre for the sake of playful upheaval, but CHOPIN'S MOVE could hardly be more different than, say, Robert Coover's NOIR, a novel whose baroque pyrotechnics it by design never comes anywhere near. The novelists that Echenoz resembles are French novelists, generally, his countrymen. There is to be certain more than a little hint of the Nouveau Roman, though I thought more of Alain Robbe-Grillet's 1966 film TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS than I did any of his novels with which I am familiar, though certainly did recognize is CHOPIN'S MOVE fealty to Robbe-Grillet the novelist's pronounced interest in objects and spaces, with human beings thinly drawn, conspicuously irreal, frequently ciphers. I also thought a bit of Jean-Philippe Toussaint whilst reading CHOPIN'S MOVE. Toussaint is another contemporary French writer whose novels have found a home in English translation at Dalkey, and as with Echnoz his work is characterized by ironic intelligence and understated oddness. These are all French writers whose work is rich in ideas, all of them at times seeming like chess masters moving pieces on a board, their cunning everywhere evident ... for those looking on with sufficient care. I would suggest that it is no accident that Echenoz has written a smart, streamlined absurdist novel of ideas which is also a playful deconstruction of the conventions of genre fiction. If we consider that the traditional philosophical concept of the absurd, within and beyond modernist conventions, lies is the fundamental meaninglessness of existence, Echenoz would seem to see such meaninglessness as likewise at the heart of our pacifying entertainments. If already in Borges there is the emergence of a tradition that sees in the hyper-rational sleuth a tendency to encounter the impregnability of fundamental problems inherent to deduction, Echenoz takes apart the spy novel to reveal that our popular imagination remains obsessed by pointless labyrinthine endeavours, probably because our lives are themselves generously garlanded with endeavours equally pointless. The comedy of human existence is a comedy of vigorous struggle for naught. This becomes all the more evident when the human life finds itself situated amidst the manoeuverings of other sinister, opaque operators, themselves steadfast, themselves invariably floundering. An absurd novel about the sundry pratfalls of interconnected political operators ultimately cannot help but serve as commentary on the geopolitical realm more generally. Political power is characterized by the compromising appetites of powerful men and women already compromised by their blind spots. And nature as the backdrop. The ground of our absurd theatrics is an unmoved material world, offering nary a remark, no matter to what violence we may deign to subject it and each other. The absurd really does come down to Hamlet. Tale of sound and fury. Signifying nothing. Of course it is always a pleasure when the tale is as indelibly told as is Echenoz's rueful farce.