Details

ISBN-10: 0819562475
ISBN-13: 9780819562470
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publish Date: 09/01/1991
Dimensions: 8.40" L, 5.40" W, 1.50" H

The Book of Questions: Book of Yukel, and Return to the Book (Rev. Trans. from the French)

Translator: Rosmarie Waldrop

Paperback

Price: $32.95

Overview

A meditative narrative of Jewish Experience and man’s relation to the world.

The Book of Questions, of which volumes IV, V, VI are together published here, is a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man’s relation to the world. In these volumes the word is personified in the woman Yaël, silence in her still-born child Elya. Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jabès every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world against all that threatens his existence- death, the infinite, silence, that is, God, his primal opponent. How can one speak what cannot be spoken?

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Reviews

"first of all a response to the problem of writing after the Holocaust, of speaking the unspeakable. To Theodor Adorno's assertion that 'one can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz, ' Mr. Jabès offers the poet's only possible reply: 'One must.' Mr. Jabès recognizes, though, that one can no longer write as before. His answer to this dilemma takes the form of a series of questions about book, word and sentence, speech and silence, God, justice and the law. Instead of one narrative voice, The Book of Questions offers a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. It is a work of great moral authority and urgency as well as beauty."–Michael Palmer, New York Times Book Review

"For anyone who is interested in the last frontiers of thought and language he is an irreplaceable writer."–Graham Martin, Times Literary Supplement

"Language of rare density, a powerful and abrupt unit of tone, a vibrant soberness at the same time lyrical and abstractunique in French prose."–Roger Caillois, Les Nouveaux Cahiers

"Neither novel nor poem, neither essay nor play, The Book of Questions is a combination of all these forms, a mosaic of fragments, aphorisms, dialogues, songs, and commentaries that endlessly move around the central question of the book: how to speak what cannot be spoken"–Paul Auster, New York Review of Books

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Details

ISBN-10: 0819562475
ISBN-13: 9780819562470
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publish Date: 09/01/1991
Dimensions: 8.40" L, 5.40" W, 1.50" H
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