Aurora

Leiris - associate of the Surrealists, then later, Bataille, Sartre, groundbreaking anthropologist - wrote this single novel which he published more than a decade after its composition, and his own description of it cannot be bettered: Despite the "black" or "frenetic" style of its blustering prose, what I like about this work is the appetite it expresses for an unattainable purity, the faith it places in the untamed imagination, the horror it manifests with regard to any kind of fixity - in fact, the way almost every page of it refuses to accept that human condition in the face of which there are some who will never cease resistance, however reasonably society might one day be ordered.