Aminadab (French Modernist Library) [Paperback]

Maurice Blanchot (Author), Jeff Fort (Translator, Introduction)

Book Description

Series: French Modernist Library | Publication Date: June 1, 2002

The world of Aminadab, Maurice Blanchot's second novel, is dark, bizarre, and fantastic. Reminiscent of Kafka's enclosed and allegorical spaces, Aminadab is both a reconstruction and a deconstruction of power, authority, and hierarchy. The novel opens when Thomas, upon seeing a woman gesture to him from a window of a large boarding house, enters the building and slowly becomes embroiled in its inscrutable workings.

Although Thomas is constantly reassured that he can leave the building, he seems to be separated forever from the world he has left behind. The story consists of Thomas's frustrated attempts to clarify his status as a resident in the building and his misguided interactions with the cast of sickly, depraved, or in some way deformed characters he meets, none of them ever quite what they seem to be. Aminadab, the man who according to legend guards the entrance to the building's underground spaces, is only one of the mysteries reified by the rumors circulating among the residents.

Written in a prose that is classical and at times lyrical, Blanchot's novel functions as an allegory referring, above all, to the wandering and striving movement of writing itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Aminadab is a startling provocation, a gauntlet thrown down to the fiction reader - and yet there is no complicated theory or code to be cracked in order to participate in the originality of Maurice Blanchot's 1942 novel. Maurice Blanchot may hardly be a household name in America, but in some circles he is one of the essential writers of the 20th century... Every sentence of Aminadab is an invitation to think, about language, about responsibility, about life. Blanchot's density requires us to slow down our reading; he makes us pause, grow uncomfortable. Yet we are taken by Blanchot's seerlike ability to penetrate to the core of some of the darker aspects of the 20th century." Washington Post Book World July 2002

About the Author

Maurice Blanchot is one of France's leading authors of fiction and theory, including The Most High and Awaiting Oblivion, both available from the University of Nebraska Press. Jeff Fort is a lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Southern California and has translated Blanchot's "The Instant of My Death" for Conjunctions.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (June 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803261764
• ISBN-13: 978-0803261761
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,191,697 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Groping for What GoesThere, June 6, 2010

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Michael H. Shenkman "Mentoring the Creative S... (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Aminadab (French Modernist Library) (Paperback)

This book was exhausting. It demanded more than reading, and threw off more than sparks of realization. So one has to give way to its continual assault on sense making and find one's own way. As Blanchot's Thomas does in these melted pages, these riveting whirlpools of sentences and heaps of steaming, liquified words. How is it that such diffusion of image and even allegory can be so compelling? It is because every one of those sentences is uttered at the very extremities of the voices's words and one needs to go with them just to get to the next step. Frightful, and exhausting.
Jeff Fort's introduction is brief and pointed in giving the reader a foothold, And it is a good one, but insufficient, as Fort surely knows.
This is an allegory of writing the same way the Odyssey is a novel about a voyage. This is an epic assimilating myth and rousing a sense of a new realm of being. Thomas journeys through a sensibility that has a structure, dimensions, inhabitants, all of whom dissolve before him and dissolve him, bringing him to the darkness, finally, that absorbs all that would not live, leaving just that pure moment -- not of a novel, but of an act of living at the edge, while all that has been constructed, declared, sworn to, cleaned and inscribed utterly disappears. And one is left with raw, pure, coming to a singular life.
Blanchot was not yet at the point of writing the neutral, but he felt its work. His great teachers, Mallarme and Kafka resounded; his great friends, Levinas and Bataille gave words and thus shocks of transmission. The neuter was coming, the book was coming. And that book would be named, "Disappearance," a pure wandering as Fort helps us appreciate, in the fore-naming of "Aminadab."
What would come is that sparking and flecking (Blanchot later quotes from Beckett) where the darkness comes, as through a window into an inscription, as though cut with a diamond and foretold of the young girl and held in amorous embrace of the pure light Lucie, and accompanied by the companion who always hears the sounds of breaking into being, Dom. These are the characters of that great concrescence of the refusal to be obliterated, by law or anything else, and step into first what is singular, and then what can be written of it, for all to mark as they wander along their own paths.
Exhausting. And this is the only way. Blanchot is our host, our guide, the tenant to whom we turn our reading.