The conceit of Jacques Jouet's most recent novel, La Montagne R (1996), is simple enough, yet engagingly droll: the leaders of fictional-but transparently French-'Republic' decide to build a 1500-meter mountain near the capital, both to provide jobs through a massive public works project and as a monument to national prestige. The project will go awry (as indeed it inevitably must), but not in the way we might expect. National monuments, like novels, dig their foundations deep in the human imagination; yet in politics, as in literature, things are very rarely what we first imagine them to be.
