SOURCE: A review of The Most High, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 185-5.

In the following review, Lowenthal summarizes The Most High comparing its narrator to that of Kafka's The Trial.

Despite the wealth of translation of Maurice Blanchot’s work available, the arrival of one of his novels in English tends to be not only welcome but needed: the profound depthlessness, the illuminating opacity of his essays and fiction continue to put the very possibility of literature at stake.

Written in the aftermath of World War II, The Most High depicts a society of vague familiarity, one made up of bureaucracy, an ominous police force, revolutionaries, decay, and a plague not dissimilar to the one described by Camus. If this environment feels more like science fiction than a historical narrative, though, there is good reason: history has ended, and the “Law” has infiltrated...