ABSTRACT
Critics still tend to see modern and especially postwar French literature as dominated by three movements: Surrealism, Existentialism, the New Novel. Like Proust, Drevet retrospectively imagines states of consciousness. He seems to hope, through writing, to recover that supposedly pristine state in which a child's access to the totality of the world is more or less immediate - unfiltered by memories, values, education, socialization. The ever-changing view from the train window is a natural metaphor for this search, and as the Micheline pulls into or out of stations, Drevet sometimes glimpses a banal yet haunting human gesture "whose consequences people will never know". A detached, often abstract, though sometimes stunningly sensual level of language sustains a tense "density of expectation" from beginning to end. Drevet is thus also fascinated by time: by how he felt it passing then, by how he feels it passing now as he writes.
