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A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book

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This is not a narrative but a series of aphorisms which occasionally grow into more precise prose meditations. Aphorisms however sometimes sound like clever twists of logic which prove nothing but verbal dexterity though and that is one problem with Jabes work. But that weakness is also sometimes a strength as Jabes makes use of the malleability inherent in language to stress the malleability in individual identity which is his main theme in this, his last, book. The book is a meditation on what it means to be a foreigner. For Jabes who was forced out of his homeland Egypt in 1956 because he was a Jew and who lived in exile until his death in 1991 being a foreigner was something with which he was well acquainted. Through all of his aphorisms and twists of logic Jabes seeks a higher truth whereby contact with the foreigner or "other" leads to greater self-knowledge which in turn leads to the knowledge that we are all one and the same separated only by the biases of the age in which we live. The language is distinctly existential but the content is humanist.