[Horst Bienek's determination in Bakunin: An Invention] to level stridently with the reader at every turn reminds one most of the Pompidou Centre: all the lines of construction, all the cables and conduits bringing essential supplies, are deliberately displayed and painted vivid colours. Nothing is hidden, nothing extenuated: we follow the author as he visits Neuchâtel to research into the great anarchist writer, as he interviews people who fail to remember anything, writes chivvying notes to himself, makes lists of further reading, examines his own motives, quotes from Bakunin and Turgenev's Rudin, then loses interest and sends his books back to the library. There is some play between the anarchist's vigour and idealism and the present writer's lassitude, but little else within the knowing and self-conscious shell of the form. A bookseller who is interviewed remarks at one point that the artist who really wants something new must be an anarchist; and it's more than possible that Bienek, by writing a book about not being able to write a book, is trying to create the first example of anarchist fiction. He certainly knows how to lob a bomb at the powers of concentration. (p. 407)