The Crab Nebula (La Nebuleuse du crabe) is comprised of fifty-two vivid chapters that provide startling insights into the existence of this nebulous man named Crab: his nightmarish-and none too solid-physique, his mysterious absence from the pages of history, his birth in prison, his never having been born at all. In his portrait of Crab, Eric Chevillard gives us a character who is genuinely strange and curiously like ourselves. A postmodernist novel par excellence, The Crab Nebula parodies literary conventions, deconstructs narrative and meaning, and brilliantly combines absurdity and...