For three days I wandered the labyrinth of Jean Ray’s 1943 novel, Malpertuis1, fumbling my way along its gloomy passages. These notes are my only recollections; vague sensory impressions from a story told by an idiot, a tale of sound and fury that unravels in darkness, its cloistered spaces repulsively damp, brought to life via a procession of splutterings, clickings, creakings, gratings and silvery tinkles; its characters little more than crumbs of incoherent murmuring, sobbing, laughing, chanting, hissing and weeping. More than a novel, Malpertuis is a composition, a score, a set of instructions for listening toward inky-blackness.
