Marie Redonnet. Nevermore. 1994.

Erotic surrealist detective novel set in San Diego, France, 1954

Restrained and precise sentences narrate a mystery story of subdued emotion and torturous complexity. A dreamlike mood is induced less by implausible events than by an implausible density of events and a detached perspective. The convoluted story involves more than twenty central characters and is hard to engage in a normal way: here are so many betrayals and deaths and shifting alliances, with so few of the characters described at length, that it is hard to tell what matters.

My efforts below to draw the plot using the notation of Harry Stephen Keeler are incomplete, but still give some indication of how tangled this novella is. (Lines are characters, dots are significant encounters between them, and circled dots are (always, it seems) abrupt sexual encounters).