Customer Reviews

Desire for a Beginning/Dread of One Single End

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jabes is rarely easy to read - his demands on the reader are too high. In this slim volume, this is even more true for, if one has not read other works by Jabes, it would be difficult to place his primary vocabulary - page, book, Nothingness, etc. - in the intended context.

If you are familiar with his work, however, you will find all the usual reasons for loving the book. An example of an unforgettable image: "Serpent may be a word so drawn out that it cannot help crawling along its own shadow".

His look at death and freedom is etched in thought provoking images of frail birds that provokes a deep melancholy, an emotional thread much stronger than in his other works.

There is a mention of Auschwitz as a formative moment for those living in the second half of the twentieth century, but the Holocaust does not inform the whole work as it does in the Book of Questions. Rather, these aphorisms reflect on the inevitable, individual death in the face of the only truth known to us - Unknowability.

An absolutely brilliant book that marketed as his "last substantial work" reminds one how great a writer was lost in his death.

Desire for a Beginning/Dread of One Single End
Jabes is endlessly exploring the Word as cause, proof and question in the enigma of existence, particularly the existence of the individual. The Word as a primal element in Judaism is caught, examined and revered in all his works. The near-universality of the Word as a primal element in religions and cultures gives Jabes' work enormous breadth beyond the Jewish tradition in which it begins. This is, however, probably not the book with which to begin reading Jabes; it is even more cryptic than most of his other works. Start with The Book of Questions.