Ten Novels With Peculiar Antagonists

(alphabetically by villain)

On My Honor by Malacai Black (the Boy Scouts of America)
The Literary Conference by César Aira (Carlos Fuentes’s necktie)
As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (an emptiness in the fabric of space)
The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino (half a viscount)
Down with Gargamel! by Luis Othoniel Rosa (intergalactic Smurfs)
A Void by Georges Perec (the letter E)
Demolishing Nisard by Éric Chevillard (nineteenth century French literary critic Désiré Nisard)
Lazarus Is Dead by Richard Beard (returning from the dead)
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus (toxic language)
The Inverted World by Christopher Priest (the y=1/x equation of a hyperbola)

— July 27, 2021