From the 1960s onwards Calvino's work often took the form of a game played between himself and the reader, or himself and a concept. In stories such as t zero and The Night Driver (1967) he goes astonishingly far, stripping out character and plot yet retaining narrative momentum. These stories aligned Calvino with the OULIPO group, the Paris-based circle including Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec, which sought to graft the rigour and constraints of mathematics onto the freedoms and ambiguities of literature. Not everyone was a willing passenger on these particular journeys, however. Gore Vidal, who in a famous 1974 essay in the New York Review of Books effectively launched Calvino in the English-speaking world, grumbled that t zero "could have been written (and rather better) by Borges" and that The Chase reminded him of Robbe-Grillet. "This", he clarified, "is not a compliment".