Maurice BlanchotReviews

"[And] she stared at me, but in a strange way, as if I had been in back of myself, and infinitely far back."

Precious: sending plaster casts of a hand to a palm reader. Decadent the first time, but when it happens twice in the same novel (against all odds!) one thinks this surely must be a trope of Huysmans's (Huysmans sentenced to death the same year Blanchot sentenced to be born), or is the mechanical conveyance of plaster a conceit to avoid the dread-ful fortune-teller scene (Impossible to pull off in literature, not even by Kleist.)

Compared to the stupefied physicians of the early 20th century, overwhelmed by the pathophysiology of disease and an obligation to tonal fidelity at bedside, modern physicians are perhaps better on the margins. (Surely more accurate at prognostication than the palm read, though likely hardly less halting.)

"[Infidelity's] merit is to keep [a] story in reserve,"
On infidelity to a tone. A sad moment becomes happy, or there is a moment of comedy or delirious-transcendence ("A perfect rose"), but only to return to a greater silent despair; though Blanchot may not be aware that the sadness turned to humor turned to sadness can become (burnt) humor again at the final moment. (Compare this to the vision of 'silence beyond silence beyond silence.')

"[But] the road wants to see if the man who is coming is really the one who should be coming: it turns around to see who he is. [. . .] Unhappy is the path that turns around to look at the man walking on it;"

Ok, I'm an unabashed enthusiast for French literature - at the same time that I'm an anti-nationalist. I'm reminded of a French-Canadian friend asserting to me that French culture is much more supportive of language play than American culture is & I find that easy enuf to believe. My friend sd that there're French comedians whose comedy is oriented around complex puns - contrast this to endless dick jokes & you get the idea.

W/ the preceding in mind, I mention that 5 of my favorite writers are French: François Rabelais, "Comte de Lautrémont" (honorary Frenchmen despite his being an Uruguayan expatriate - he wrote & died in France), Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, & Georges Perec. Raymond Queneau is certainly high up there too. many others that I'm probably not thinking of at the moment.

As such, I've definitely read more French writers (in English translation) than most Americans. & I tend to seek out the more experimental ones. & I've found some of them to be colossal bores. On the minus side there's been Michel Butor's "Passing Time" [you can read my shoddy review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2963301.Passing_Time] & Nathalie Sarraute's "The Planetarium" (don't remember this one at all). I even plowed thru at least 5 novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet. I almost liked those - if only for their formal severity.

& then there's Maurice Blanchot. I read "The Madness of the Day" 1st. It did nothing for me [you can read me saying the same thing in 5 sentences here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1147264.Madness_of_the_Day]. Then I read the considerably longer "Aminadab". I liked that a bit more but still not enuf to really embrace Blachot [See my somewhat more extensive review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/445745.Aminadab].

But I'm stubborn. So I just read this 3rd bk b/c I'm curious - he's obviously a thoughtful writer but what can I get out of it? A man goes to a door. He's surprised by who opens it. There's another woman who lives there. Maybe he knew her before, maybe he didn't. He moves in.. or stays there for a little while.. or something.. Maybe he had a history w/ one or both of the women.. Such is the skeleton of the 'plot'. But no 'meat' fleshes out these bones - the rest of the bk is all 'marrow' instead, it's all internal - in the 1st person narrator's excuse for a mind. If this guy were a friend of mine he'd drive me crazy.

The bk seems to be based around canceled-out dualities. "Time has passed, and yet it was not past" The narrator seems to be trapped in some sort of limbo of microscopic analysis - so tedious as to be borderline monomaniacal. As he got thru the doorway & the internal monologue started in earnest I practically groaned w/ the knowledge that, yes, this was going to be a Blanchot novel like the other novels. Was Blanchot like this as a person? Did he spend all his time FIXATED on ideas that he was incapable of putting into any kind of life-affirming action? If so, I'd hate to be him on his death-bed.

All of wch isn't to say that this wasn't 'good' in some sense. As a reader, just navigating the narrative was an interesting challenge: Who are these people? What is their interrelationship? The 1st-person implies things that it doesn't deliver - as if the narrator already knows it so why shd he say anything about it? Then again, who these characters are & what they're doing w/ each other appears to just be a pretext for presenting the narrator's introversion:

"Now I have to say this: even though I saw how real it was, this gesture left me feeling uncomfortable, uneasy. Why? This is hard to understand, but it made me think of a truth whose shadow it would be, it made me think of some sort of unique, radiant thing, as though it had tried to condemn to mere likeness an inimitable instant. Bitter suspicion, disconcerting and burdensome thought."

What's he 'reacting' to? One of the women taking his 2 hands & putting them against her throat. Is he a paranoid?

I gave a not particularly enthusiastic review to Blanchot's "The Madness of the Day" wch was, at that point, the only thing I'd read by him. Then my respected colleague Franz Kamin sd I shd give him another chance so when I found this bk I picked it up. Others put in a good word for him too. I've read many 19th & 20th century French writers so I definitely have a taste for such things but Blanchot's a writer I never discovered when I was most in the thick of such interests.

Whilst reading it, though, I found myself wondering: Do I even ENJOY reading anymore? Perhaps if I'd read it 30 yrs ago I wd've found it fascinating. As it was, I mostly just found it tedious - much like the only bk I've read by Michel Butor. The back-cover promo for "Aminadab" compares it to Kafka's "enclosed and allegorical spaces" &, yes, it's very claustrophobic - like Kafka, like Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast Trilogy" - wch I loved as a young teenager.

But this is the type of claustrophobia that reminds me of friends making what I consider to be 'bad' decisions - I just felt like saying: "Don't do that!" - like talking to a character in a horror movie about to make a fatally stupid blunder. In other words, as the protaganist goes thru his progressive entanglement, I found myself caring only insofar as I was annoyed.

Also on the back cover blurb it says: "Blanchot's novel functions as an allegory referring, above all, to the wandering and striving movement of writing itself" & keeping that assertion in mind made the bk slightly more interesting to me. Strangely, but as a nice change from the norm, the 'romantic' aspect of it is downplayed to the point of barely a mention in the translator's intro. However, it seems to me that the bk is as much about human relationships as anything more formal - w/ the human relationships not being very appealing to me.

All in all, "Aminadab" is fairly original & unusual - 2 qualities I always search out - but I found myself not caring very much. Blanchot has helped me realize that I want something very different out of writing than what wd've been interesting 30 yrs ago (just based on its difference). Now? It's not so clear what I want - stimulation, of course, but maybe I'm too jaded to receive that easily.

Station Hill is one of my favorite publishers. They published Franz Kamin's only record, That's enuf to endear them to me forever. This bk, however, didn't really do anything for me. I probably just didn't appreciate it enuf.

The essay on Lautréamont is great, but the one on Sade is one of my favorite essays ever.

Feels like reading a Magritte painting

Eh....? your guess is as good as mine. I have almost no idea what that was all about. It feels like the literary equivalent of a David Lynch film. I gave 3-stars just because it does cause some reactions in the mind which is more than you can say about every book.

My theory is that its about a 'Lars and the Real Girl' type situation in which the protagonist is in a relationship with a sculpture of his dead girlfriends head and hands, or possibly 2-different womans sculptured parts but i mean, i really don't know what else to make from it.
My original thought was that he was a necrophiliac and had the dead women embalmed and was keeping them in a closet. :lol .

Atheistic mysticism can be interesting; when added to existential void-gazing and cod metaphysics, it's much less so. This book gets good once we leave Thomas's navel behind and spend some time with Anne, and then see how Thomas has changed (or failed to change) with Anne's death. But rather too much of this is faux-intellectual bloviating romantic silliness. I assume Blanchot's other work is less so, and look forward to reading it.

Madness of the Day demands to be watched, but then, I would think that. I first came upon it at La Mama, a theatre I’m ashamed to say I’d never been to before the beginning of this year. Mystified too – how on earth could I have spent 15 years living in Melbourne going to the theatre with the fervour of a fanatic and be writing this now?

It was the experience of seeing it performed – soliloquies, one-man shows, how I love them – that made me come back to Geneva and buy the English translation. The haziness of the experience of reading it and recognising chunks of it, but not sure if it was all as in the show, not least because it was over 40C in the shade the night we saw it, made me write to La Mama and ask.

I received back a detailed reply from the director, Laurence Strangio:

http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/madness-of-the-day-by-maur...

I couldn't even begin to rate this, unsure as I am that I even understood it. But thrilling all the same.

This is a review, a review in abeyance.
A mastery of nuance is also on display. That would be Blanchot. Parsing his brief work, there was always a subtle gleam to be explored, appreciated.

As to Derrida, I kept rereading. I noted that I read most pages at least three times. My normal life doesn't exactly champion such rigor.

I found Derrida's framing observation, the one which explored differentiated testament and literature to be wonderful, revelatory. I think the distinction is necessary in our approach to Karl Ove, especially through the Norwegian's meditation on Hitler.


There are beautiful passages on Dostoevsy and Vlasov, neither of which you imagined to be germane. That is, not German. I oculdn't resist trying that, as certainly Derrida always felt the revealing spark of the pun and the shared or adjacent etymology.


The opening selection by Blanchot approximates the autobiographical. It is a from the waning days of the Occupation. There is to be a summary execution and then there isn't. Derrida ponders the release of the former instance and the contractual baggage of the latter.


Despite the opacity of the argument, this is a marvelous triumph of poetic association.

Do not forgive. Forgiveness accuses before it forgives. By accusing, by stating the injury, it makes the wrong irredeemable. It carries the blow all the way to culpability. Thus, all becomes irrepairable; giving and forgiving cease to be possible.

I found this collection an errant scattering of rather profound poetry. It may also be a sustained meditation on disaster, writing and loss, but I was unable to locate any connective tissue.

I read this on a lovely spring day, most of such in an IKEA parking lot. It was wonderful to read a few lines and then ponder the resonance while gazing upon the blue sky. Blanchot appears intrigued by certain stances of Nietzsche and Celan. This interest is manifested in a half dozen lines.

How far we are from the proliferation of sentences in ordinary discourse, sentences that never stop being generated, in an accumulation unimpeded by contradiction but, on the contrary, provoked to a point of a vertiginous beyond.

I asked aloud last week, what the hell is so special about Blanchot? Of course, I had read so little, just some wartime book reviews he penned for a newspaper. Still I saw reverence for him everywhere, across seventy years of European thought.

I imagined that this tome --where Foucault and Blanchot reflect on the other-- would afford me some perspective. It did. Unfortunately, Foucault talks about Blanchot the novelist, where I have no experience nor immediate access. There are references to darkened hallways, locked anterooms, foggy boardinghouses -- all of it fascinating, but alas. There is also a suspicious lack of politics.

Blanchot provides a gleaming tribute to Foucault's career and accomplishments. As with most of these encounters between thinkers, I only long for more.

Around this brief work there plays a hum of reverie, a murmur of melancholy and tender despair. . .

Saw this and others in the series remaindered in Chicago and such was duly purchased. This isn't a journal, but rather Blanchot's collected journalism from the period of Occupation. There are some philosophical ruminations here, particularly on the concept of civilization, but by and large these are literary reviews. The texts reviewed in such are largely forgotten. Other than the two theoretical pieces, there isn't much here to interest the lay reader.

This book barely made sense. I think that was intentional, actually, and it certainly came across as a very artsy novella, with lots of 'deep' introspection, and occasionally an idea that was pretty good. Most of this novella though is so vague that it drags like a dead weight. Considering the death theme in this story, that may be appropriate too, but it doesn't make for a very enjoyable read.

cluck cluck cluck... celan ... cluck cluck heidegger... cluck token swipe at hegel cluck cluck celan... fin. I usually enjoy blanchot - in moderation - for its insightfulness, but this time around I could only detect a certain hastiness and tone of exhausted, solemn and priestlike repetition. But on the bright side: the font! The redeeming quality of this book lies in its font!

I have been rendered somewhat speechless by this book. It is so surreal that I really don't know what happened or what to say about it. It appears to be written in two sections. In the first, the narrator details his interactions with J., a dying young woman. The second part takes place during the bombing of Paris during WWII. The first part is much more lucid with something that resembles a story. The second part is not -- reading summaries/reviews it apparently revolves around three women, but I only remember one.

Part of my frustration is that early on Blanchot teases the reader with hints of what is to come: "{This story} could actually be told in ten words. That is what makes it so awful. There are ten words to say." A few pages later, he describes a mysterious attack a woman has after she attempts to open a closest door where the narrator kept "proof of these events". As the narrator continued to drop hints about the awful events, I found myself reading faster and faster to discover what happened. However, the narrator is never able to say those ten words or describe "the events". I believe this is the authors intention - to meditate on the impossibility of language and words to convey one's experiences. However, I needed a few more markers, a few more bread crumbs to help me follow his tortuous intent.

It is a book that would have been greatly helped by an introduction or a translators note -- something that frames the book and sets realistic expectations. I think if I reread it, I will enjoy it tremendously.

Fourteen pages of fermented spirits brewed at the truth distillery, aged 40 years in an oaken barrel, drunk by me while teetering on this shifty fulcrum of a Monday. Maybe I'll give it a proper review someday...if the madness of my own days ever lessens.

Gerrit Kouwenaar Vier gedichten

Hans Tentije Schemeringen

Marc Reugebrink Vijf gedichten

Hans Faverey Gedichten uit: Doorboord

Rutger Kopland Drie gedichten

Bernlef De utopie van het moment. Over de poëzie van Rutger Kopland

Hans Tentije ‘Met een bek vol blaf’. Een nieuwe krisis in de nederlandse poëziekritiek?

Hans Tentije In gesprek met vijf kritici

Rein Bloem Alles in de wind, alles in de wind

Hans W. Bakx Osvaldo en Amyntas

Jürgen Becker (vert. Jacq Vogelaar) De deur op zee – bezoek in ballingschap

Jacq Vogelaar Naschrift bij De deur op zee van Jürgen Becker

Maurice Blanchot (vert. Jeanne Holierhoek) De Igitur-ervaring

Stéphane Mallarmé (vert. Jeanne Holierhoek & Han Evers) Igitur of de Waanzin van Elbehnon

Han Evers Nawoord bij Igitur

Dense. Opaque. Discouraging but with a warm heart hidden far beneath the surface.

This book very nicely fills in (though its size could also be a bit intimidating) the practical void of English translations of Blanchot’s work on fiction. If you don’t know who Blanchot is, think of him as a modern version of Kafka. Therefore, if you (seriously) love literature, its reading is absolutely essential!