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“…language of rare density, a powerful and abrupt unit of tone, a vibrant soberness at the same time lyrical and abstract…unique in French prose.” —Roger Caillois, Les Nouveaux Cahiers
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?
“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
“For anyone who is interested in the last frontiers of thought and language he is an irreplaceable writer.”—Graham Martin, Times Literary Supplement
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
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EDMOND JABÈS was born in Cairo in 1912. He left Egypt during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and now lives in Paris. In 1970 he received the Prix des Critiques; in 1982, the Prix des Arts, des Lettres et des Sciences of the Foundation for French Judaism; and in 1983, the Pasolini Prize for poetry. Translator and poet Rosmarie Waldrop was educated at the University of Aix-Marseilles, the University of Freidburg, and the University of Michigan.
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