Works was Édouard Levé’s first book—of text, anyway—but by the time he arrived at literature he already had the aura of one who had alighted there out of some combination of happenstance and vagabond fascination, as though it were a medium he would flirt with briefly before moving back to photography, or forward to film or sculpture or, say, clothing design or applied animal husbandry. Structurally and generically, Works has little in common with the three texts that would follow: Journal (Newspaper, 2004), which takes the form of a single day’s paper, divided into the customary sections, international affairs through television listings, from which all identifying names and places have been removed; Autoportrait (2005), a fractal memoir of 1,500 first-person sentences, in no apparent order, describing details of mostly mundane import; and Suicide (2008), an exercise in affective memory occasioned by the recent suicide of the narrator’s friend, and whose manuscript was famously delivered to the French publisher P.O.L ten days before Levé hanged himself in his apartment in Paris. What unifies Levé’s books is a questing sort of ambivalence, an elegantly moody detachment from the way life goes about itself in the actual world. The results are all depressive and magnificent in their own way, and in their own way all reinforce a notion of the author as more of a melancholy dilettante, a homesick alien anthropologist, than a writer.

The momentum of Works, accordingly, is derived in large part from the scuffs and ricochets of an artist’s first sustained experiment with text as a vehicle for ideas. Published in French in 2002 and in Jan Steyn’s English translation earlier this year, the book is a catalogue-style assembly of 533 descriptions pertaining to, in the words of description no. 1, “works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.” These take a wide variety of shapes and sizes, though very few of them are literary in any practical sense; most are visual or tactile or experiential, paintings or photographs or installations or simply things, often constructed from other things—a winter coat made out of glowworms, for instance, or “the wings of a stuffed pheasant […] made from glued-together bees.” Levé’s appealingly agnostic definition of work extends from form to disposition, and the items herein are by turns serious and mischievous, pointed and vague, physically conceivable and irreducibly imaginary. Here is an arbitrary but more or less representative sample:

19. A butterfly is released into a room, hidden from sight. Every night, its flight, detected by laser beams, is transmitted to a mobile machine equipped with an hourglass. By morning, the imprint of the nocturnal flight is drawn in sand on the floor.

71. A film follows a woman in her daily life. The narration is flat, the action non-existent, the sound ambient. No questions are posed, no answers given, no commentary made. The film begins in the metro and ends in a movie theater. It is set in Paris.

335. A pair of pants is plaited using super-8 film, upon which, from up close, we can see a pair of lips repeating the phrase: “Pants made out of Lip Film.”

394. Mounted to a wall, mounting materials form large letters: “MOUNTING.”

As for quality, such as we might define it, some of the works inventoried boil down to garden-variety conceptualist idea-mongering, overt in their symbolic encapsulation of a distinctly Parisian brand of disenchantment, but just as many are utterly winning in their Roussellian pointlessness (“348. A political lobbying group aims to have zoo animals paid a monthly salary”). Perhaps the best are both at once, obscurely troubling and purely, gaily novel: “349. A metallic anthropomorphic robot runs endlessly on a treadmill, in a gym”; “333. A large chair is surrounded by several smaller tables.”

For all of the works here, though, words are all there is—a marriage of medium and message that, on balance, never looks quite inevitable. This is not the point of the exercise, surely, but neither does it turn out to be the handicap it might seem. (It bears pointing out that Levé’s photographic exploits—such as the 1999 series Homonymes, portraits of private citizens who share names with celebrities, or the 2002 series Pornographie, in which expressionless models in business-casual dress are suspended in x-rated poses—are governed by a similar apparent estrangement between form and agenda.) Levé’s ambivalence toward language, which arguably runs through all of his work, is cunningly productive here: the imposed flatness of these dimensionally complex pieces is what makes them radiate out from page to mind, what bestows on them the sense of potential that encourages us to engage with them. By this logic, to see them as imaginary artworks reduced to words is to look at them the wrong way around; rather, they are words shaped into blueprints, theoretically extensible into an infinity of further realizations.

Thus we may begin to suspect Levé of swaddling his conceptual visions in utilitarian language in order to pull off a classic French modernist feint: literally authorizing his readers, compelling us to take an active role in investing the text with meaning, form, reality. (This is a universal and infinitely controversial quality of all language, of course; only in the sense of doing it with quasi-political deliberateness is it French or modernist.) Most of the time he does pull it off, which makes Works abnormally slow-going for its 104 pages: for each instance where our imaginary production of the work is short-circuited by the textual medium, there are ten where it is energized, spurred almost involuntarily. Somehow, the ratio of short-circuited to spurred seldom breaks down along the expected lines—consider the equivalent but opposite difficulties of conjuring either of these two:

230. A black cone is painted on the surface of a promenade. The cone begins ten centimeters away from a wall that has an artificial eye encrusted into it and ends sixty-five meters further on. Its area corresponds to the visual field wherein the human eye can focus on objects. Closer than ten centimeters, everything is blurred, further than sixty-five meters, everything is clear-cut, without having to focus. Adaptation is impossible on one case, unnecessary in the other.

236. Artists who are also bikers are photographed in a group.

Generous is not the word that comes to mind, but nonetheless Levé registers as oddly scrupulous about stimulating creation on the reader’s part. There is never exactly the right amount of data in the description of a work to erect a mental scale model in living detail—faithfully, as it were—but sometimes there is not enough data, other times too much. Certain items leave fundamental questions open—when, where, how—while others contain an extra specification that corresponds to no available bigger picture, a relief map of an unexposed part of the iceberg. The sand comes from an hourglass, the treadmill is in a gym, the event takes place on a Sunday. Some descriptions are overly vague and overly precise at the same time:

331. An object is put on a pedestal in a dark room. A narrow orifice in the ceiling allows sunlight in once a year—at the exact hour when a woman’s life ended. The object was in the woman’s pocket when she died.

What, properly speaking, is the “work” here? In cases like the above, where no medium of presentation is indicated, the idea freely unanchored in space and time, the line seems almost impossibly thin between a piece of art and a figment of psyche, an uneasy dream, a thing in suspension between the imaginary world and the actual. The entirety of entry 295 reads: “A man in a dark cupboard, covered in red body hair, seen through a small crack in the door.”