The novel deliberately keeps itself at arm’s length from its subject, but it’s brevity barely allows that aloofness to become alluring before Ravel’s cognitive decline makes him utterly inaccessible.

Perhaps if the novel had been longer, or the peripheral characters allowed more space (especially Ida Rubinstein), Ravel’s personal style and manner—his costume and toilette, his comportment—would have had more opportunity to uncoil, as these elements (Echenoz’s true fixation, not Ravel the man) are so compressed, so involuted, like a spring under pressure.