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Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books
Marcel Bénabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn, meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a full one accuses. Bénabou knows the heroic joy of depriving critics of victims, the kindness of sparing publishers decisions, and the public charity of leaving more room in bookstore displays. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (Pourquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres) provides both a respectful litany of writers’ fears and a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them.
111 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Marcel Bénabou
18 books5 followers"Emeritus professor of Roman history at the Paris Diderot University, Marcel Bénabou's work focuses on ancient Rome, in particular North Africa during Antiquity and acculturation and romanisation processes at work in these provinces.
A member of the "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" (or OuLiPo) since 1969, which he joined one year after his friend Georges Perec, the following year he became the definitively provisional secretary. Since 2003 he combines this function with that of provisionally definitive secretary.
His Oulipian works often focus on the genesis of literary work and autobiography.
He appears in the guise of the lawyer Hassan Ibn Abbou in the novel La Disparition by his friend Georges Perec."
A member of the "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" (or OuLiPo) since 1969, which he joined one year after his friend Georges Perec, the following year he became the definitively provisional secretary. Since 2003 he combines this function with that of provisionally definitive secretary.
His Oulipian works often focus on the genesis of literary work and autobiography.
He appears in the guise of the lawyer Hassan Ibn Abbou in the novel La Disparition by his friend Georges Perec."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
August 30, 2010
This "nonbook" is an erudite, solipsistic essay on the torturous process of trying to complete a sentence. Bénabou is the "definitively" provisional secretary of the Oulipo, so it's no wonder he finds himself so intimidated when it comes to his own work.
In the end, of course, despite the paranoia, navelgazing and discourse, he carves a strange and original niche for himself with the whole "nonbook" genre. I for one love this genre and wish other authors would write more nonbooks.
In the end, of course, despite the paranoia, navelgazing and discourse, he carves a strange and original niche for himself with the whole "nonbook" genre. I for one love this genre and wish other authors would write more nonbooks.
July 29, 2019
In the beginning, a short sentence. Only half a dozen words; simple words, the first to come along, or almost the first. Assigned above all to mean that here ends a silence.
Okay, you got me. That’s good advice: “the first to come along, or almost the first”. And “here ends a silence” – that’s poetry! Not that it’s anything new, mind, but Maurice Bénabou doesn’t make that claim.
I am of course a bit late in joining the cohort of those who make the book the subject of their books, who make writing the theme of what they have written.
Hence his paralysis – or near-paralysis. Hence his self-questioning. Here is a man who, it seems, has read one of everything; who knows and anticipates and forsakes all the tricks writers use to make spells of their books; who, at times, believed himself incapable – because too critical – of such magic. Starting from the certainty – or apparent certainty – of his calling, he then proceeded by reduction, deleting from his conception of his work everything that had precedent. There wasn’t much left. And ultimately, all he can do is describe the book that could have been, if all his restrictive parameters were fulfilled, via another book – this book – that is, inevitably, a compromise.
Of all the obscure, or in any event poorly elucidated, facts of my past, the most surprising for me is still this one: why did I come to believe one day that I should write? A simple, seemingly obvious question, yet it took me a long time to feel the need to ask it of myself. It was only after a first long series of aborted attempts that doubt as to the validity of my “calling” appeared and that I came to wonder about the origins of what, until then, I had considered a kind of determination independent of my will. But after that questioning commenced, it did not cease; indeed, at certain times the better part of my work consisted of responding to it.
Ah! Now (though again, such work is far from without precedent) we’re getting somewhere! Though Bénabou claims allegiance with Raymond Roussel, this positions him, for me, with Beckett. And, to me, it’s this struggle – to account for his writing, to justify it, to excuse it even – that gives his book depth. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, surprisingly, and despite all clues to the contrary (the familiar “playful” self-reflexiveness, the likewise playful direct address to the reader, the tortured convolutions of many of its playful sentences), is heavy, not least because it appears to have been born from suffering. Yet because of its author’s extreme distaste for such things, it never becomes, more than periferally, a sufferer’s memoir.
I, after all, is only a word like any other, a simple tool – useful at times – with which it is not forbidden to play, provided, however, that the game does not, as sometimes happens, lead to self-idolatry.
No danger of that here. Never, despite Bénabou’s canny observation that even self-mockery is a form of self-veneration, does he share more than is strictly necessary to convey the central dilemma that drives the book – a dilemma which, consequently, appears as close to universal as is possible. It’s all familiar, at least to this fellow self-questioner (who also hasn’t written any, or has written very few, of his books): at one point he even describes, in a short paragraph, his quasi-Pessoan detour through multiple personas, a phase which I’d been certain was hardly unique to Pessoa but of which, maybe, only those who do not write (or at any rate publish) their books have the luxury.
Bénabou, in other words, is a fellow traveller, an underachiever made good who bequeathes us, if nothing else, the story of his Sysiphan labours. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books is a slim book (or “non-book”, as Bénabou would have it) but it’s significant, because it takes us a step closer to a complete, complex, coherent archetype of heroic literary failure. And call me crazy, but in a world full to bursting with books, I say we need a few more non-books. With The Book of Disquiet, with Beckett’s Watt, with Robert Walser’s The Robber, Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books stakes out, boldly, almost despite itself, new territory. Vast territory; all Bénabou’s done, virtually, is put a fence around it. And while his non-book appears to be just more “writing about writing”, it is actually – subtly, deftly, movingly – about something else entirely: namely, Bénabou, the modest perfectionist, who would rather he’d never had to write about himself at all.
January 29, 2022
"Ese libro que acababa de terminar, por descontado me correspondía a mí escribirlo: hallaba en él la mayoría de mis temas predilectos, algunos de los personajes que yo mismo había esbozado, y hasta las sinuosidades de lo que yo creía que constituía mi estilo".
Propósito de año viejo: iniciar el cambio ahora, antes de 2022, que es un año con un número feo feo.
1) Regresar aquí. Leer. Reseñar.
2) Escribir. Terminar mi novela infinita (pero esto no sucederá hasta 2022, o 2023).
Aparquemos 2, de modo que
1) Qué mejor para empezar que un libro con este título. Aunque, bien mirado, después de leer un libro así uno se cuestiona si decir algo vale la pena. Seré conciso, pues:
Lo mejor:
El epígrafe de Pierre Reverdy. El miedo a abrir un libro que cuente lo que tú quieres contar en otro. El miedo a que lo cuente mejor. El terror a que lo cuente peor. El humor. La rabia con humor. La capacidad de bajar los brazos con la cabeza bien alta. Los epígrafes. El anti-prólogo de Vila-Matas.
Lo peor:
Sospechar que cualquier libro de ficción que Bénabou hubiera condescendido escribir me hubiera gustado más que este.
Propósito de año viejo: iniciar el cambio ahora, antes de 2022, que es un año con un número feo feo.
1) Regresar aquí. Leer. Reseñar.
2) Escribir. Terminar mi novela infinita (pero esto no sucederá hasta 2022, o 2023).
Aparquemos 2, de modo que
1) Qué mejor para empezar que un libro con este título. Aunque, bien mirado, después de leer un libro así uno se cuestiona si decir algo vale la pena. Seré conciso, pues:
Lo mejor:
El epígrafe de Pierre Reverdy. El miedo a abrir un libro que cuente lo que tú quieres contar en otro. El miedo a que lo cuente mejor. El terror a que lo cuente peor. El humor. La rabia con humor. La capacidad de bajar los brazos con la cabeza bien alta. Los epígrafes. El anti-prólogo de Vila-Matas.
Lo peor:
Sospechar que cualquier libro de ficción que Bénabou hubiera condescendido escribir me hubiera gustado más que este.
October 9, 2009
Many passages in this book made me ask: why haven't I written this book?
Read
August 23, 2022Why Oulipo Constraints Have to Be Consistent
Marcel Bénabou's "Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books" promises to be a pure example of Oulipean practice, especially because Bénabou has been an active member in Oulipo for decades, and was a close friend of Georges Perec's. But it's not, because it often fails to follow its own logic. Inconsistency is suggested in the list of Bénabou's books at the end. Most of them do not exist, but some do: one is a scholarly text, and another is a collaboraive project with Perec. So it's advertised in the book itself that the title is not accurate.
The sort of inconsistency I have in mind is not the same as Roussel's (apparently!) intentional misdirection in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books," which doesn't actually make good on the promise of its titles. And it's not the kind of inconsistency that results in an incompete project, as in Perec's exhausted "Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris," or the common, perhaps inevitable, kind of inconsistency that comes from making mistakes in the application of one's own self-imposed constraints. Those three kinds of inconsistency are consistent with the Oulipean project, because they do not affect the writing's fundamental disaffection.
What happens in this book is different. Bénabou begins and ends with ideas about why fiction should avoid any number of normal practices. He notes that at one point he "set out to turn a treatise on rhetoric into an adventure story and a very well known anthology for students into a love story," and he even toyed with other categories—"dictionaries, encyclopedias, chronologies, even... the white and yellow pages" (p. 103). He sometimes talks like a doctor who would like to cure people of literature: he wanted to "raise a bit of anxiety," he says, "provide a bit of uneasiness—if mild, if fleeting—in those who... gave themselves over in all tranquility to literary activity" (p. 98).
He is also clear, sometimes, on the ontological claims implicit in his title. "Thus, writing that one would like to write is already writing," he says, "so I knew what was left to me to do: a kind of tour de force by which I would have to manage to give fictive existence to books that don't really exist." (p. 105). The result is that in the end—on the book's penultimate page—he concludes that the book "could claim to be a very classic novel" (p. 107). But the reason it could claim such a thing springs from the inconsistency in the book, because he's thinking that he's actually told "the story of an ever deferred meeting, of a frustrated love strewn with obstacles"—referring to the book's main narrative, which is about how he spent his early years dreaming of writing a single book that would encompass all of his life and all of literature.
That story is essentially a memoir. He dreams of writing a perfect book, but he can't bring himself to start. He chides himself for being lazy, he recounts his family's expectations (p. 63), he wonders if his Jewish milieu made his anxiety and ambition inevitable (p. 75). He was ecstatic when he discovered the pleasure of blank sheets of paper (p. 79), and he collected blank notebooks. He was full of "dreaminess" and "illusions." He observes the literary world from a safe distance (p. 55). He never thought to question his own "taste for preparations, preiminaries, and preludes" (of which the book is full), his "mania for analysis" (p. 59). All this seems self-reflective, but it's a standard narrative, a Bildungsroman. It doesn't have to do with doubting literature, as Oulipo does. It has to do with the narrator doubting himself, struggling with his ambition and inability to write. Eventually, Bénabou turns that back into an Oulipean skepticism about writing, by means of a further narrative of discovery.
He continues with his biography for about a third of the book, then, as if he's recovering from the belief in the exact kind of narrative he's been providing (supposedly under cover of irony, in the name of explaining why he ended up not writing any of his books), he tells us how he began to doubt autobiography and memoir (there would be no more "gushing over my childhood," p. 89), and realism itself ("I scorned the idea of describing my house with its wrought-iron doors," p. 88), and decided to turn to fiction (p. 91), before doubting that, too, and emerging into the position he currently holds.
There is a difference between not writing any of your books because you want to show "writing that one would like to write is already writing," or because you don't want to repeat conventional forms like memoirs or realist novels, and not writing any of your books because you are overwhelmed by the difficulty of literature, swamped by your own unformed ambition, hypnotized by paper or by the ideal of the single perfect book. It's in the spirit of Oulipo to take a diffident, metaphysical stand against literature, and to come by that stand after considering the many "traps" (as Bénabou says) of conventional forms. It is not in the spirit of Oulipo to tell a story about your ambition to write and how it failed. And it's not in the logic of Oulipo to move from one mode to the other through a narrative of self-discovery.
Marcel Bénabou's "Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books" promises to be a pure example of Oulipean practice, especially because Bénabou has been an active member in Oulipo for decades, and was a close friend of Georges Perec's. But it's not, because it often fails to follow its own logic. Inconsistency is suggested in the list of Bénabou's books at the end. Most of them do not exist, but some do: one is a scholarly text, and another is a collaboraive project with Perec. So it's advertised in the book itself that the title is not accurate.
The sort of inconsistency I have in mind is not the same as Roussel's (apparently!) intentional misdirection in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books," which doesn't actually make good on the promise of its titles. And it's not the kind of inconsistency that results in an incompete project, as in Perec's exhausted "Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris," or the common, perhaps inevitable, kind of inconsistency that comes from making mistakes in the application of one's own self-imposed constraints. Those three kinds of inconsistency are consistent with the Oulipean project, because they do not affect the writing's fundamental disaffection.
What happens in this book is different. Bénabou begins and ends with ideas about why fiction should avoid any number of normal practices. He notes that at one point he "set out to turn a treatise on rhetoric into an adventure story and a very well known anthology for students into a love story," and he even toyed with other categories—"dictionaries, encyclopedias, chronologies, even... the white and yellow pages" (p. 103). He sometimes talks like a doctor who would like to cure people of literature: he wanted to "raise a bit of anxiety," he says, "provide a bit of uneasiness—if mild, if fleeting—in those who... gave themselves over in all tranquility to literary activity" (p. 98).
He is also clear, sometimes, on the ontological claims implicit in his title. "Thus, writing that one would like to write is already writing," he says, "so I knew what was left to me to do: a kind of tour de force by which I would have to manage to give fictive existence to books that don't really exist." (p. 105). The result is that in the end—on the book's penultimate page—he concludes that the book "could claim to be a very classic novel" (p. 107). But the reason it could claim such a thing springs from the inconsistency in the book, because he's thinking that he's actually told "the story of an ever deferred meeting, of a frustrated love strewn with obstacles"—referring to the book's main narrative, which is about how he spent his early years dreaming of writing a single book that would encompass all of his life and all of literature.
That story is essentially a memoir. He dreams of writing a perfect book, but he can't bring himself to start. He chides himself for being lazy, he recounts his family's expectations (p. 63), he wonders if his Jewish milieu made his anxiety and ambition inevitable (p. 75). He was ecstatic when he discovered the pleasure of blank sheets of paper (p. 79), and he collected blank notebooks. He was full of "dreaminess" and "illusions." He observes the literary world from a safe distance (p. 55). He never thought to question his own "taste for preparations, preiminaries, and preludes" (of which the book is full), his "mania for analysis" (p. 59). All this seems self-reflective, but it's a standard narrative, a Bildungsroman. It doesn't have to do with doubting literature, as Oulipo does. It has to do with the narrator doubting himself, struggling with his ambition and inability to write. Eventually, Bénabou turns that back into an Oulipean skepticism about writing, by means of a further narrative of discovery.
He continues with his biography for about a third of the book, then, as if he's recovering from the belief in the exact kind of narrative he's been providing (supposedly under cover of irony, in the name of explaining why he ended up not writing any of his books), he tells us how he began to doubt autobiography and memoir (there would be no more "gushing over my childhood," p. 89), and realism itself ("I scorned the idea of describing my house with its wrought-iron doors," p. 88), and decided to turn to fiction (p. 91), before doubting that, too, and emerging into the position he currently holds.
There is a difference between not writing any of your books because you want to show "writing that one would like to write is already writing," or because you don't want to repeat conventional forms like memoirs or realist novels, and not writing any of your books because you are overwhelmed by the difficulty of literature, swamped by your own unformed ambition, hypnotized by paper or by the ideal of the single perfect book. It's in the spirit of Oulipo to take a diffident, metaphysical stand against literature, and to come by that stand after considering the many "traps" (as Bénabou says) of conventional forms. It is not in the spirit of Oulipo to tell a story about your ambition to write and how it failed. And it's not in the logic of Oulipo to move from one mode to the other through a narrative of self-discovery.
May 5, 2021
Why I have not read many of the books on my shelves this year.
Marcel Bénabou's short book is certainly not the cause. As noted, it's a brief and also a breezy read. Nothing to discourage one there. Bénabou is excellent company - undemanding, witty, erudite, modest, all too human. Georges Perec knew this. B��nabou was his friend and it was on this basis that Perec introduced him to the Oulipo. It took me months to read Why I have Not Written Any of My Books. But that's no reflection on its quality.
Some years I read a lot. I read over forty books last year - not many compared to all you professional readers out there, but a lot for me. So far this year, I have managed three, including Bénabou's splendid little book. And we're into the fifth month already. I have a whole host of reasons. Some of them are similar to the reasons Bénabou presents for not having written any of his books. Life has got in the way. I've had a lot on my plate. Renovations and relocations. Logistical support for mural creation. Studying. I could have written about Eliza Robertson's paper, Rhythm as a Metaphor for Presence in Prose Fiction but I don't think any of my Goodreads friends would have been especially thrilled.
Bénabou offers a similar defence. For many years he was too busy living to write. But this is just one of his reasons. He has many others (he procrastinates at book-length in defence of procrastination). Bénabou didn't wish to write just any old book. He wanted to write a great book of the kind he had long envisaged. He was waiting for the moment. He was intimidated by all the great book that had already been written. He would make time for writing and take himself off to some isolated place, there to dedicate himself to the task. He would lay out on the floor all of the beginnings of books he had written. He'd re-arrange them, hoping something would fall into place. Then he'd go back to Paris.
Ah, but here's the irony. Bénabou had known from an early age that he was destined to be a writer. His family had encouraged him in this ambition, alluding regularly to this destiny. But Bénabou had also known from an early age how to procrastinate. As a child, he loved unsullied, blank paper. His elder brother had introduced him to the blank stationery at the office where he worked. Young Marcel was allowed to take a selection of virgin forms and blank sheets of foolscap. They became a treasury for the boy, unmarked, prisitine. What better way to prepare for a not writing career? And here's another irony; Robertson following Derrida writes a good deal about the importance of blank space in creating rhythm in prose fiction.
There's a paradox too. In procrastinating and excusing himself for not having written any of his books, he has done precisely what he says he hasn't. And in the end, this book turns out to be an elegy for all those other great books he'd liked to have written but never will. Now that's true humility. This little tragedy will be recognised instantly by anyone who has ever tried to write something of worth.
With this book, Bénabou has lodged himself firmly in my roster of favourite History professors.
Marcel Bénabou's short book is certainly not the cause. As noted, it's a brief and also a breezy read. Nothing to discourage one there. Bénabou is excellent company - undemanding, witty, erudite, modest, all too human. Georges Perec knew this. B��nabou was his friend and it was on this basis that Perec introduced him to the Oulipo. It took me months to read Why I have Not Written Any of My Books. But that's no reflection on its quality.
Some years I read a lot. I read over forty books last year - not many compared to all you professional readers out there, but a lot for me. So far this year, I have managed three, including Bénabou's splendid little book. And we're into the fifth month already. I have a whole host of reasons. Some of them are similar to the reasons Bénabou presents for not having written any of his books. Life has got in the way. I've had a lot on my plate. Renovations and relocations. Logistical support for mural creation. Studying. I could have written about Eliza Robertson's paper, Rhythm as a Metaphor for Presence in Prose Fiction but I don't think any of my Goodreads friends would have been especially thrilled.
Bénabou offers a similar defence. For many years he was too busy living to write. But this is just one of his reasons. He has many others (he procrastinates at book-length in defence of procrastination). Bénabou didn't wish to write just any old book. He wanted to write a great book of the kind he had long envisaged. He was waiting for the moment. He was intimidated by all the great book that had already been written. He would make time for writing and take himself off to some isolated place, there to dedicate himself to the task. He would lay out on the floor all of the beginnings of books he had written. He'd re-arrange them, hoping something would fall into place. Then he'd go back to Paris.
Ah, but here's the irony. Bénabou had known from an early age that he was destined to be a writer. His family had encouraged him in this ambition, alluding regularly to this destiny. But Bénabou had also known from an early age how to procrastinate. As a child, he loved unsullied, blank paper. His elder brother had introduced him to the blank stationery at the office where he worked. Young Marcel was allowed to take a selection of virgin forms and blank sheets of foolscap. They became a treasury for the boy, unmarked, prisitine. What better way to prepare for a not writing career? And here's another irony; Robertson following Derrida writes a good deal about the importance of blank space in creating rhythm in prose fiction.
There's a paradox too. In procrastinating and excusing himself for not having written any of his books, he has done precisely what he says he hasn't. And in the end, this book turns out to be an elegy for all those other great books he'd liked to have written but never will. Now that's true humility. This little tragedy will be recognised instantly by anyone who has ever tried to write something of worth.
With this book, Bénabou has lodged himself firmly in my roster of favourite History professors.
January 6, 2008
The book is playful about a serious subject. Writing. There is nothing funny about writing. It's hard man! I know because I write, and when I write something that I like - it is usually an 8 hour day getting that sentence right. It's crazy!
Marcel Benabou wrote a really great little book that is always (in my studio) two or three feet away from me. I haven't read it since the late 90's, but it makes me feel warm that it is there when I need it. Hmm, I wonder what is thoughts are on Literary Crack, better known as Goodreads?
Marcel Benabou wrote a really great little book that is always (in my studio) two or three feet away from me. I haven't read it since the late 90's, but it makes me feel warm that it is there when I need it. Hmm, I wonder what is thoughts are on Literary Crack, better known as Goodreads?
August 12, 2023
Lo leí hace muchísimos años y recuerdo que me había parecido muy bueno.
Esto es lo que pasa cuando relees algo que hace décadas te encantaba. Otro bagaje, otra forma de ver la vida, otros gustos.
En esta ocasión me aburrió profundamente: me ha sonado obvio, pretencioso y mal envejecido.
Por cierto, qué útil sería poder puntuar en Goodreads de 1 a 10. A menudo me quedo corta. Y a veces las tres estrellas de un libro no tienen nada que ver con las tres estrella del otro. En fin, que solo son etiquetas.
Esto es lo que pasa cuando relees algo que hace décadas te encantaba. Otro bagaje, otra forma de ver la vida, otros gustos.
En esta ocasión me aburrió profundamente: me ha sonado obvio, pretencioso y mal envejecido.
Por cierto, qué útil sería poder puntuar en Goodreads de 1 a 10. A menudo me quedo corta. Y a veces las tres estrellas de un libro no tienen nada que ver con las tres estrella del otro. En fin, que solo son etiquetas.
September 4, 2023
"När i dag några blad, på vilka jag antecknat titlar och datum för vad jag läst, hamnar i mina händer, när jag exempelvis råkar städa, stirrar jag länge på dem, misstrogen och bestört: vilken absurd bulimi kunde ha drivit mig att sluka så många verk, som jag inte behållit något av, inte ens minnet av att en gång ha haft dem i mina händer?" (s. 52).
April 25, 2019
This made me laugh.
April 19, 2024
Un non livre sur la non-écriture, ou plutôt sur la difficulté de mener à terme un projet littéraire, ça me parle beaucoup notamment parce que c'est écrit avec beaucoup d'humour et que ça prend le lecteur comme complice.
December 20, 2021
At first a hilarious nod to procrastination and block, this turns into a rather heartbreaking depiction of an artist's insecurity and doubt. A fascinating and unusual memoir that any writer will identify with. Unfortunately even some of the most prestigious artists feel the same as those lesser known! At least we're in great company.
October 11, 2009
One finds oneself, after reading more than 100 pages, realizing that he has just written the book he has not written. It's not like you don't know you are holding a book in your hands, but somehow you get so caught up in his NOT writing--it's most of what the book is about--that it is still surprising to realize that his not writing has become his writing. Clever and surprisingly entertaining. "A fine example," as Benabou writes at the end of the book, of the loser-wins strategy, of that bit of dialectic sleight of hand that makes of a collection of failures a path toward success." 10/09
Want to read
October 22, 2007I've been meaning to read this for a long time...
April 18, 2018
I hear you, Marcel. I hear you.
February 24, 2023
Desde una perspectiva mordaz e incluso cínica, el autor muestra la peculiaridades del bloqueo escritor, la autoexigencia o el peso que le damos a cosas que, contadas por él, son lo mismo que nada.
Tiene un vocabulario muy bueno y me ha gustado como trata veladamente asuntos como la repetición de temas y demás dudas que le surgen a un escritor.
Entretenido y breve, pero con gran trasfondo. La edición que leí era la de la editorial Plot, con prólogo de Enrique Villa-Matas.
Tiene un vocabulario muy bueno y me ha gustado como trata veladamente asuntos como la repetición de temas y demás dudas que le surgen a un escritor.
Entretenido y breve, pero con gran trasfondo. La edición que leí era la de la editorial Plot, con prólogo de Enrique Villa-Matas.
November 24, 2023
Es personal y universal y tierno y terco y todo lo que se atreva a meterse en medio. Realmente fue una experiencia espectacular leerlo, identificarme, verme a la distancia y regresar al libro.
Intimisisisisisísimo.
Qué librazo, hasta parece un espejo.
Intimisisisisisísimo.
Qué librazo, hasta parece un espejo.
November 6, 2018
This book explains a lot...
May 10, 2020
I 5 gwiazdek dla tłumacza.
October 19, 2021
"That is the great advantage of inner life: it grants everyone the privilege of preferring himself to all others."- Simone de Beauvoir
How's that navel lookin', bub?
How's that navel lookin', bub?
January 1, 2022
sooooo tedious. i like what he tried to do but poor execution.
August 4, 2012
Writing about writing. Writing about writing about writing. There might have even been some writing about writing about writing about writing. A clever, neurotic monologue on the inability to write and the ability to consider oneself a writer. There are some really stunning thoughts in this ("I have lived for a number of years on childhood memories the way others in days gone by lived on the income from their investments" p. 71). I did find the structuring of the book (e.g., the way everything was in 3s) distracting at times. Distracting isn't really the right word - I'm not sure what it was distracting me from, anyway. It got a little, "Look what I can do, maman!", I guess. But the structure actually is pretty cool, the writing is witty and funny and it satisfied my desire to get inside someone else's head (and to find the overlap with my own), the allusions to things I'd never heard of made me feel just the right amount of dumb, &c., and the whole thing was short enough that it didn't have time to lose its charm.
April 10, 2016
Ein Buch für Buchliebhaber, das einen Autor dabei begleitet, wie er ein Buch nicht schreibt und am Ende, nachdem er sich über all jene Bücher, die er nicht geschrieben hat, und die Gründe dafür ausgelassen hat, erklärt, warum das Buch das er geschrieben hat, kein Buch im eigentlichen Sinne sei, ein Nicht-Buch sozusagen.
Der Autor liefert hier einen sprachgewaltigen Streifzug durch die Fallstricke, welche Autoren wie Leser erwarten, erfreut uns mit den Gründen zu lesen und zu schreiben, wie auch beides zu lassen und verführt uns Schritt für Schritt, ihm bei seinen Gedankengängen durch die unentrinnbare und unentwirrbare Faszination von Sprache und Literatur zu begleiten. Man kann ihm zustimmen und ihm widersprechen. Der Dialog zum Leser ist so kunstvoll konstruiert, dass man sich ihm kaum entziehen kann. Kaum ein Klischee dieses Themas wird ausgelassen und dabei so kunstvoll pointiert gesetzt, dass es geradezu erwartet wird.
Der Autor liefert hier einen sprachgewaltigen Streifzug durch die Fallstricke, welche Autoren wie Leser erwarten, erfreut uns mit den Gründen zu lesen und zu schreiben, wie auch beides zu lassen und verführt uns Schritt für Schritt, ihm bei seinen Gedankengängen durch die unentrinnbare und unentwirrbare Faszination von Sprache und Literatur zu begleiten. Man kann ihm zustimmen und ihm widersprechen. Der Dialog zum Leser ist so kunstvoll konstruiert, dass man sich ihm kaum entziehen kann. Kaum ein Klischee dieses Themas wird ausgelassen und dabei so kunstvoll pointiert gesetzt, dass es geradezu erwartet wird.
July 11, 2021
Es una broma de mal gusto. 18 euros por semejante burla. De lo peor que cayó en mis manos en años. Es un monólogo de pedantería para llegar a la conclusión de que lo mejor que puede hacer el autor es dedicarse a leer y no buscar más el sentido de la escritura. Luego se pregunta la industria del papel pel porqué de tanta piratería, por estafas como esta.
October 23, 2011
Dozens of small pieces of genius scattered through this text/treatise/failed/fine book. A wry pleasure that starts strong and necessarily loses steam in the last bit, yet all towards the writer's purpose. A delight.
May 4, 2012
"The writer is the one within whom the anguished soul stands beside the levelheaded man, beside the lunatic, a reasonable being and, bound tightly to a mute who has lost of all words, a rhetorician master of all discourse." p.14
June 17, 2009
Reminds me of Calvino (logical, I guess, given their involvement with Oulipo).
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