Daniel Castelain - This is a novella of possibilities never letting the necessary hierarchy develop to establish a reality. It is a machine producing possible combinations of events and situations; a novella, the boundaries of which are defined, not by what is denoted, but by the fluctuations of what is denoted... a highly unusual work

Daniel Castelain, Sentimental Talks, Trans. by Patrick Bowles, Red Dust, 1970.                           

This volume is composed of two novels whose compatibility is twofold. Each is erotic and each is concerned with art itself.... Instead of one story there are as many possible stories here as there are variables for the basic situation. - Library Journal

The timid voice(s) of this almost-work riddle the text with "perhaps", "might have," "maybe" and "could be". This is a novella of possibilities never letting the necessary hierarchy develop to establish a reality. It is a machine producing possible combinations of events and situations; a novella, the boundaries of which are defined, not by what is denoted, but by the fluctuations of what is denoted...a highly unusual work...victorious indeed -- George Angel and Dart Lindsley

In An Unlikely Meeting three people have/ may have/ arranged a meeting. The woman has been the lover of one, of both, of others. Their progress toward this chance/ planned meeting is seen from every angle. In A Sentimental Talk the group meets for an outing at Valsigne with the memory of their meeting last year at Rames. Only Jack is missing. They try to reconstruct what happened at Rames. It turns out that one time can not be separated from the other or seen from one point of view.

Excerpt:
To begin with there could be two different towns fairly far away from each other and in a room in an hotel in both the one and the other, standing by the wash-basin, a man respectively making an identical movement in the mirror...There could be a third town too, and another man, having left his hotel, paid the bill and gone to the station in this other town and asked there for a ticket to that town, exactly, where the man and woman will perhaps meet, in fact this man coming from this other town might be going to meet the other two characters, for some reason or other, getting on the train at the same moment as the other man would be getting on the other train in the other town, both trains being on their way to the same terminus