his usual instinct as a writer had been to seek narrative orderliness—to “always connect one sentence with the next, always look for a smooth transition.” Now he tried to take some encouragement from the novelist Georges Perec’s formal experiments with narrative gaps and omissions. “I never experienced such an uncomfortable situation,” Carrère told me. “Honestly, it’s a flaw of the book. Well—this flaw, it’s part of its identity.” He mimed a limp.