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Title: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (French Modernist Library) by Marcel Benabou, David Kornacker, Warren Motte ISBN: 0-8032-6139-X Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr Pub. Date: April, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Arch and poignant metafiction (some will find insufferable)
Comment: This somewhat autobiographical sort of a novel, first published in French in 1986, won the Black Humor Prize. The most interesting part is a sketch of the author's background--as a child of a Sephardic Jewish family that had been in Morocco for four centuries. He assumed he was destined for greatness (as a writer) and sees this as a sort of ontogeny for the phylogeny of the Chosen People. Both as a 20th-century Jew and as someone who (like Camus) feels lost the paradise of living under the North African sun (living in the dingy, gray Paris of the 1950s), he believes he has a duty to remember.
His later book _Jacob, Manahem, and Mimoun_ fulfills that duty in a fuller way, though that book, too, is about the failure to create the literary masterpiece he always expected from himself. Bénabou (and/or his narrator) has conceived many masterpieces, but shied away from apprentice works, or, indeed, from writing more than a few pages of any of his grand designs. "What had been a confident wait imperceptibly transformed itself into torpor."
The book about his nonbooks (the books he didn't write) starts over and starts over and starts over, but, aided by some very apposite quotations about writing from myriad other writers, details the ultimately impossible love of an author who can not bring himself to besmirch beautiful virgin sheets of white paper even to create the literature that would redeem his claim to be a writer.
In addition to the universal reasons for putting off writing (especially the ease of reading instead: Bénabou characterizes his compulsive reading as a form of bulimia), a French writer has to beware the "reigns of theoretical terror which generally crop up in the most protected circles and make of reality the negligible byproduct of a few concepts."
Many people have realized that being unsuited for writing and even unable to string more than a few words together does not remove the desire to be a writer. Without venturing beyond the struggle with writing (to the absurd lot of blocked writers such as Anthony Burgess' Enderby or Michael Chabon's Grady Tripp) Bénabou makes being a writer who does not and cannot write archly funny and even poignant.
I characterize it as a "sort of novel" because nothing happens, not even a change of consciousness of the narrator. The "somewhat autobiographical" links to the lost Moroccan Jewish world, and, perhaps, to not being able to write anything remotely conventionally a novel. However, Bénabou, who has earned his living as a professor of ancient history, published a book in 1976 on African resistance to the Roman Empire, and had published another eight as the 'Definitely Provisional Secretary' of Ouvroir de Littrature Potentielle (the Workshop of Potential Literature founded in 1960 by the playful Raymond Queneau and of which the master of metafiction, Italo Calvino, joined), so was not so blocked as the narrator of _Why_.
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Title: Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 0865475407 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 16 June, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Midnight Disease : The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty ISBN: 0618230653 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau, Barbara Wright ISBN: 0811209458 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Pub. Date: April, 1985 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Twentieth Century Classics) by Georges Perec, John (Editor & Translator) Sturrock ISBN: 0140189866 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: August, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer ISBN: 1842124501 Publisher: Phoenix Press Pub. Date: 31 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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