Customer Reviews

Aminadab (French Modernist Library)

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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.