More than a love story, it is a tale of abjection, in both the conventional and theoretical senses. All That Sang also has other theoretical interests; the protagonist muses on time, on what it means to be seen (or to not want to be seen). Perović also indulges in a little postmodern self-reflexivity, claiming what she is telling is not a “proper story,” that stories belong to happy, heterosexual love, to those who come from “proper” countries, with long histories and only one language – dubious claims subverted in the making.

The novella is also a tale of two languages, playful and lyrical. French terms are integrated into the English text, which bilingual readers may find nicely reflects their experience; this is one of the pleasures of the text. Another is the protagonist’s musings on the two languages: “Le pantalon is better than either trousers or pants. Fact.”

But even as the slippage between languages and other textual friskiness (puns, passages in Latin and in Cyrillic characters, sections in Q and A format, neologisms such as the excellent description of Parisian breakfast items as “butterthings”) enrich what might otherwise be a fairly thin plot, grammatical quirks create awkwardness for the reader. While some of these quirks (such as a transitive verb used as if intransitive) may be intended to convey the intrusions of other languages on the English of the narration, others seem more like mistakes (for example, lack of agreement in number or tense). Typographical and usage errors create further doubts. In such a playful and language-conscious text, one wants to know what idiosyncrasies the author intended, in order to consider their roles in the text. Of course, no book will be totally free of mistakes, but when so much of the value of a text lies in its hyperconsciousness of language(s) and clever language play, one must be a extremely, shall we say, exigeant.