"Texterminator" by Christine Brooke-Rose (Carcanet, 1991)

In an age when literary characters fear death a conference is arranged using religious themes as well as literary interest to prolong their lives. At the Christian session ("In the name of the Reader, and of the Interpreter, and of His Imagination"), terrorists dressed in long white robes and black turbans spray machine gun fire. A White Knight kills them off. But is he real? And were the terrorists? And what about the detectives (Columbo, etc) who investigate? In the list of the killed, the main character sees her own name. Has she too become one of the forgotten characters of literature?

At the end the Hilton Hotel where the delegates are staying falls. Rescue teams work non-stop for 5 weeks, after which the government decides whether to resist or yield to speculators.

The Ideal Reader make an appearance. So do sentences in French and German. So do puns

Characters are constellations you know, constellations of semes Did you say semen? Could be. In a spermissive society. You and I are situated at different narrative levels. And yet we meet. Here for instance

By now you'll probably have a good idea whether this is a book for you. I didn't think it went far enough into the comic and theoretic possibilities, but that's probably because I missed so many of the allusions.

"Remake" by Christine Brooke-Rose (Carcanet, 1996)

Written in the 3rd person. Having worked at Bletchley Park, she looks at the past the way she used to sift the espionage reports and messages, looking for patterns to give substance to the trivia. On the last page it says "Memory intercepts the messages of a mysterious invented enemy unseen, giant knight or flaming dragon, the interceptor a speck in time facing the immensity of confrontable selves". As a child she put up with trilingual jokes; as an adult she compared the soap operas of various countries (English ones have working class people, Italian ones have doctors and lawyers). Facts and impressions are fired out sentence after sentence. "the first twenty-three years so starkly crammed and anecdotal, the second twenty-two years, one chapter". It was more like a conventional autobiography than I expected.