Thomas the Obscure [Hardcover]

Maurice Blanchot (Author), Robert Lamberton (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1988

Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the "new novel, " the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, "the ontological narrative"--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Admirers of Kierkegaard, Sartre and Beckett will enjoy Blanchot's philosophical rumination on existence in the form of this odd novela tragic existential romance of sorts. Thomas and Anne meet at a country hotel and believe themselves to be in love. We learn nothing of their pasts, mutual or personal, or of their plans or hopes. Such superficialities as character development do not concern Blanchot. Instead, the narrative focuses on the neurotic pair's inner worlds, where every slight notion and observation of the outer world carries explicit philosophical implications. The mental processes play unbroken for pages like impassioned and cerebral jazz piano pieces: the ocean is the modern soul, creatures are ideas, cats talk in monologues and the greatest action is a nervous collapse. With this couple, Blanchot examines the extent to which we are separated from our fellow humans by our solipsistic natures. Insight and true high comedy reign throughout these suffering-soaked chapters, remarkably and elegantly translated by Lamberton. For those who dare, this new version of the first novel by the influential French writer, a mystifying and ingenious work, will not soon leave the memory.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

A novel of consciousness brought to a high point of perfection, Blanchot's masterpiece thus far , one of the major works of contemporary French literature: such is Thomas the Obscure --Georges Poulet --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 124 pages
• Publisher: Station Hill Pr (September 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0882680773
• ISBN-13: 978-0882680774
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,648,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Unsettling Book, June 27, 2001

By 

Aristides Niko (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Thomas the Obscure (Paperback)

The tendency of prose to settle while being read will not be found in this book. Stability of the mind will be a memory worth forgetting as you embark into a personalized world of disturbing imagery (disturbing in a good sense)and ambiguity at its absolute height. A must read for anyone interested in non'linear literature.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading the Foam, April 10, 2010

By 

Michael H. Shenkman "Mentoring the Creative S... (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Thomas the Obscure (Paperback)

"A stone rolled, and it slipped through an infinity of metamorphoses the unity of which was that of the world in its splendor. In the midst of these tremblings, solitude burst forth...Thomas went forward. The great misfortune which was to come still seemed a gentle and tranquil event."
This passage comes near the end of Thomas the Obscure (p. 114); but it just as well could have been placed in the beginning. It is not that nothing happens in the course of this brief and intense fiction - it is as long as it can be, and no shorter. Anne dies. That is event enough.
The book gathers around that event, and eavesdrops on two beings that are differently enveloped in it: Anne dying and Thomas affected. What we hear are the murmurings of their beings, waves of singular beings crashing onto the shore, of this death; the slightly different tones and rhythms of the waves' slapping is what we hear. The text is all foam. We begin with Thomas in the water, losing himself there. Awaiting the death, witness to the dying, and the intimate companion of this dying woman. Foam: the in between formations of the water's detritus that mark what the accumulated cycling of wave upon purely flowing wave deposits around the shoals of these individuals.
Anne, in dying, (not quite her own dying) wonders at Thomas' perpetual absence. The "obscurity" of Thomas is her rendering of him. She bursts onto the scene at a dinner occasion, blazing with beauty and concentrates Thomas' attention. The vividness of the encounter creates the book, but does not provide Anne with companionship in her most solitary moments. Anne has died by the time the passage cited above comes up in the text, but maybe she has already died, whatever that means for Thomas, by the time the book begins, with Thomas in the ocean, amid the foam, maybe drowning, communing in dying but absent from Anne's bedside.
I find Blanchot's fiction arresting. It is the fiction that needs to be written and only can do so as art (in one form or another, and Blanchot writes it), and is what art has to be. This is the fiction of beings' speaking enroute to the human event. Impossible, because being does not speak - and therein lies the essential fiction. Blanchot knows of this, and details his acquaintance in unsurpassed non-fiction (but still fiction-making) essays, thought pieces, thought experiments all. Thomas poeticizes in prose the most dear and precious moment: when we need a voice from beyond, need some assurance of deliverance or salvation; and what is delivered is only the voice of that being, its waves one by one, one word, one sentence following on and on, crashing onto the shores of the most human act of dying. This is the only fiction there is: the evocation and writing of this voice. (Deleuze certainly heard it.)
Blanchot had long ago completed Thomas when he wrote this fictional conversation (how many voices, we do not know): ""Attraction by which, keeping us in the mystery of the illusion, we think we recognize them, name them, keep them at a distance under the brilliance of the name, and thus, embellishing it, facilitate their approach." - "Always too close for them to be near to us." `' "And yet separated by the movement of their coming." - "They're not coming."" (The Step Not Beyond; p. 111)
The names here: Thomas and Anne. We think we can know them when they do not even "know" each other. Thomas, walking, is tranquil "before" the event, the waves break, and we read the foam.