SOURCE: “A Sort of Defeated Tenderness,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1998, p. 6.

In the following review, Pindar offers a positive assessment of Awaiting Oblivion and evaluates the critical studies of Blanchot by critics Leslie Hill and Gerald Bruns.

The lengthy trial and recent conviction of Maurice Papon marked a turning-point in France’s gradual acceptance of the Vichy regime’s complicity in the Holocaust. As one of the lawyers in the case argued, Papon did not have blood on his hands, but blood on his pen. After the verdict was announced, a representative of the Jewish deportees’ families said: “France now knows that the soulless pen-pushers, too, will be held to account.” In the 1930s, while Maurice Papon served in the Foreign Ministry, another Maurice, Maurice Blanchot, was an unlikely pen-pusher of a different sort; he was a political journalist. In recent years, he too has not escaped...