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 Yael, 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 Jabes 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?
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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
"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
The Book of Questions is "first of all a response to the problem of writing after the Holocaust, of speaking the unspeakable. To Theodor Adorno's assertion that 'one can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz,' Mr. Jabes offers the poet's only possible reply: 'One must.' Mr. Jabes recognizes, though, that one can no longer write as before. His answer to this dilemma takes the form of a series of questions about book, word and sentence, speech and silence, God, justice and the law. Instead of one narrative voice, The Book of Questions offers a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. It is a work of great moral authority and urgency as well as beauty." --Michael Palmer, New York Times Book Review
"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
The Book of Questions is "first of all a response to the problem of writing after the Holocaust, of speaking the unspeakable. To Theodor Adorno's assertion that 'one can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz,' Mr. Jabes offers the poet's only possible reply: 'One must.' Mr. Jabes recognizes, though, that one can no longer write as before. His answer to this dilemma takes the form of a series of questions about book, word and sentence, speech and silence, God, justice and the law. Instead of one narrative voice, The Book of Questions offers a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. It is a work of great moral authority and urgency as well as beauty." --Michael Palmer, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Rosmarie Waldrop's superb translation of Jabes now makes broadly available the work of a writer whose concerns are close to those of some of the central American poetry and fiction of our present time. His is a poetry of interpretation, a madly belated midrash on the scripture of silence, a meditative mode in which scholia and commentaries animate the book of life...His questionings are those vast ones which can occur only when answers have already been given once and for all." (John Hollander )
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13 of 19 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
this book changed my life forever. it changed the way i see life, religion, my culture, and writing. if you haven't read it yet, you don't know the feeling of suddenly falling but remaining in the same place.
9 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By "clavastida"
Jabes has found a truth beyond words, the act between two thoughts, maybe all that is left to man when reflecting on Shoa. This book reminds me of Feynman diagrams; a dialogue of dreams between the finality of two sentences. The possibilities within these two finalities,if not hope, provide the comfort that being alive is not necesarily knowing or understading; it starts with breathing and reaching to the other..the rest, as in physics, is a phenomenum of the moment. Read it, it will help you write your book among the authority of shared words.
6 of 19 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
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If you've stumbled upon this book and know nothing about it, you probably won't like it. To say this book is "a narrative musing" is like calling ulysses a narrative musing. It is highly abstract, abstruse, and fabulous. The the book of questions, much use is made of the question and answer format, not socratic, but in the form used by the rebbi. The questions often seem to have little to do with the answers, mimicing a koan.
If you know what this book is, you don't need to read the reviews. If you need to read the reviews, don't buy the book.
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