El empresario Jérôme Angust escucha el anuncio de que su vuelo sufre un retraso sin determinar. Un inesperado interlocutor, Textor Texel, le dará conversación a pesar de su manifiesta resistencia. A lo largo de su relato, la violación y el asesinato se irán perfilando con nitidez cada vez mayor, y Textor se transformará en una abominable encarnación de todos los fantasmas de Angust, quien verá convertida su anodina espera en una aventura ominosa y alucinante.

Ottimo racconto, decisamente sorprendente ( )

Novela corta en la que dos extranos dialogan en un aeropuerto y en la que descubren que tienen mas en comun de lo que parece en un principio. Las novelas de Nothomb son generalmente divertidas y autobiograficas, sin embargo esta no es divertida y no parece autobiografica. Aunque tiene un pequeno elemento de sorpresa en la trama que la redime parcialmente resulta un poco aburrida e ingenua y no es muy interesante. ( )

I think this would have been better as a play. More powerful even. It's 90% dialog as it is [1:]. I hated it, and I loved it. I won't give anything away, but my brain caught hints of what was to come without really processing them (the hints). I think I was too busy hating the Textor character to really analyze what was going on. Not hating the character as a creation, but hating his "personality". Of course, that's the point. I thought of _Lolita_ -- the solipsistic unreliable narrator (the difference is in the final twist).
In the end, it was delightfully disturbing, the way a car crash might be, as long as we're not part of it, rubber-necking past the wreckage. But watch out, the next car crash might involve you...
What was most interesting to me was not so much the doppelganger aspect of the story so much as the what-we-keep-hidden-from-ourselves aspect of the story. We do this every minute of every day in one degree or another. This book shows one of the possible consequences of this hiding-from-ourselves......

[1:] I usually don't like all-dialog novels. I kept thinking, why not just write a play? ( )

Nothomb doit avoir un cerveau doté d'une imagination alambiquée pour écrire de telles histoires perverses. Elle est formidable et on se laisse porté par ce récit tordu. ( )