ABSTRACT
Minimalist American fiction has been much discussed during the past decade, but probably nothing in English quite matches the supreme brevity practiced by a French writer named Georges L. Godeau. Godeau composes extremely concise prose texts that upon first reading seem little more than random snapshots or notes jotted down while the writer was sitting outside a village cafe. Revealingly, two poets as different in temperament as Rene Char and Jacques Reda have puzzled over the unquestionable "poetry" of Godeau's deceptively impassive sentences. Godeau usually positions himself as a first-person narrator, yet sometimes he speaks through the mask of another character— like Jean Renaud, an eight-year-old boy catapulted into precocious manhood by his father's death. Especially in his late work, Godeau becomes the poet not only of senior citizens on tour but also of old men (at home) dealing with un-biting fish in sleepy streams and with pretty ticket-takers at swimming pools.
