vershy versh
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We've never read him. We're going to read him. Has anyone read him?
The Work of Fire: woops and version read Blanchot
vershy versh
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I'm reading Death Sentence right now. It's only 80 pages.
" ... the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them."
vershy versh
Well-known member
I can see why people compare him to Beckett. The one I'm reading kicks off with the narrator addressing the reader and immediately establishes some sort of suspicion of writing. He talks about a crime or event, but talks around it and says there are ten words to say about it and that he thinks now is the time to say those ten words but that his words have been shrinking and crumpling away from the truth whenever he's tried to write them.
I'm reminded of Borges a little too in that you've got this mysterious event or case being detailed that seems to warp the things around it and resist description.
I'm reminded of Borges a little too in that you've got this mysterious event or case being detailed that seems to warp the things around it and resist description.
vershy versh
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If you don't mind reading on a device...
woops
is not like other people
who did the translation ???
vershy versh
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Don't worry, it's Lydia Davis not Paul Auster.
vershy versh
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The most French thing I've found in French writing is the incessant contradiction and reversal. I'm reading a book of his essays now too - 'The Gaze of Orpheus' - and in the first essay he says things like the writer is important because he has nothing to say. That sort of thinking runs through so much of French literature, or at least the French literature I've read. You get it in Debord too when he says the only truth in spectacular society is the false, and in Baudrillard when he says things like he has too much respect for reality to believe in it.
This is a line I liked from the Blanchot...
"It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which
opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a man sitting at his table
and forming letters on a piece of paper."
This is a line I liked from the Blanchot...
"It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which
opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a man sitting at his table
and forming letters on a piece of paper."
vershy versh
Well-known member
Is it the Station Hill one?
0bleak
A Liniment's Evil Work
Ah, that must be the writer who the character Elliot West was referencing in Amityville 3-D from 1983.
jenks
thread death
Yes it is. I’ve got it back off the shelf. I will attempt some tomorrow.
vershy versh
Well-known member
I'm reading Death Sentence right now. It's only 80 pages.
" ... the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them."
Finished this in a daze this morning. Genuinely strange book. It is like Beckett, but there's something more elegant and less eccentric about it, a certain gothic flavour and none of the scatological stuff. I pictured pale Victorian ghosts in black and white.
The sense of immaculate compression, of hermetic sealing, is perhaps what they share most closely. I had a similar sense to reading Molloy, that I was exploring a windowless room or a polished stone or some sort of vacuum or alien artifact with something ill-defined and vaguely sinister moving around inside.
vershy versh
Well-known member
Still reading one of the essay collections, 'The Gaze of Orpheus', so that one for now.
vershy versh
Well-known member
I'm reading Death Sentence right now. It's only 80 pages.
" ... the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them."
Silence has been coming up a lot lately between this, Burroughs and du Bouchet.
“I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo.”