The Belgian Jean-Philippe Toussaint writes for Minuit so automatically, without even knowing anything about the book or even the author, the reader knows that this won't be a 'normal' read, not of course that that has any meaning. Let meaning take a back seat and enjoy the ride.
The narrator works for the Commission européenne with an interest in futures and blockchain technology, particularly bitcoins. So when he's approached by an unknown person with a view to meeting a guy in China with a view to learning more about bitcoins he's interested, but very suspicious because he doesn't in any way want to compromise his job in Brussels.
It's uncertain why he agrees to go to China to talk to a manufacturer of bitcoins, even uncertain about why he's been chosen to go there, but he makes sure everything he does won't come back in his face, that he won't in the future be accused of any corruption, so he won't accept any expenses paid to him.
But on discovering a USB key that his contact had inadvertently dropped (or on purpose?), and on finding out from the key's contents (which suggest embezzlement) he just has to go to China to find out what he can, but without telling his bosses anything about it.
Why he doesn't say anything is a mystery, as is his meeting with the Chinese contact, as is his trying to discover anything about the technological 'backdoor', or indeed why he receives an award in China, or even why his computer is stolen from him in a toilet in China by a mysterious hand groping under his cubicle door.
But that means the talk in Japan he's going to give will be aborted, in spite of his desperate efforts to re-write it without his computer notes, and anyhow he has to return home where his father is in his final hours. So? So what does the future mean when his father doesn't have one, what does the narrator's future matter?
I felt a sniff of Kafka in this novel (possibly inverted, circumvented, oblique, subverted or whatever way), a dreamlike universe where things take on amnesiac forms, where nightmares become the norm but are soon dissipated, but then maybe this is just Toussaint throwing uncertainties not to the wind but in our face. As ever, he's nothing short of interesting, intriguing, fascinating, infuriating. And the USB key? Maybe a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin, just designed to carry the plot through without a great deal of (if any) meaning in itself.
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