Understudies: Short Stories

'Twelve little machines to make death and failure,' Redonnet calls the twelve characters -- or the twelve stories -- we find in this book, and it's true: every tale we find here tells the same story, albeit in twelve different forms, the story of a kind of erasure, of disappearance and undoing, owing to the characters' fatal need to make of themselves a copy of another. -- From the translator's introduction