Notwithstanding the unity lent by Nick Adams, In Our Time, to the extent that it concerns war, is not so much a novel as an
antinovel, a work, in other words, that defies the narrative conventions established by "the great tradition" The anti-novel, as defined by A Handbook to Literature (4th edn.), "experiments with fragmentation and dislocation on the assumption that the reader will be able to reconstruct reality from these disordered and unevaluated pieces of direct experience" (28).
Antinovel, for example, is an incomplete translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's antiroman (though this term was used at least as early as 1627 by Charles Sorel) in which French roman is rendered by English novel, but in which the and remains unchanged.
He can do so, for example, by substituting, in his complementary story, the pattern of selection typical of the
antinovel for that used in the story narrated in the novel; thus, he could substitute the Ulysses grid for that of Portrait of a Lady when reading James.
This selection from the Spring 1946 issue comes from the latter part of Patchen's
antinovel, Sleepers Awake, which was published in December 1946.
The term
antinovel was first used by Jean-Paul Sartre in an introduction to Portrait d'un inconnu (1948; Portrait of a Man Unknown) by Nathalie Sarraute.
One of the most intriguing recent examples of the heady dialectic between novel and
antinovel, Mean Women by Argentina writer Alicia Borinsky, has just been published in translation.
Younger fiction writers experimented with the
antinovel and turned to expressions of the absurd to communicate their experience.
In addition to the French
antinovel, one can also see--as Debra Castillo argues--a new theory of language being worked out in Muerte por agua, on Campos's own terms.
Because the author knows full well what a novel is and what her society is made of, she is able to present us with an
antinovel in an antinational setting and, beyond the borders of both, give testimony of her intensely Portuguese vision.
His lack of action and emphasis on detail caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of the French nouveau roman, or
antinovel.
As postmodern
antinovel, Hellblau offers little in the way of coherent plot.
Enquist's first novels, Kristallogat (1961; "The Crystal Eye") and Fardvagen (1963; "The Route Traveled"), reflect his aesthetic interest in the form of the novel and the influence of the French nouveau roman, or
antinovel. He then began to take a documentary, quasi-scholarly approach in both his novels and dramas, as in Hess (1966) and Legionarerna(1968; The Legionnaires).