Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (French Modernist Library) (Paperback)

~ Marcel Benabou (Author), David Kornacker (Translator), Warren F. Motte (Preface)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Of course Benabou has written his books, 10 of them aside from this one. But this is the kind of playful treatment of constraints, certainty and language that one might expect of a longstanding member (and Provisional Definitive Secretary) of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle). Benabou details the anguished writing process and describes what The Book, if it could be written, would be like. "There would commence a long sentence in the conditional," he says at the beginning of a long sentence in the conditional, that ends after the promised twists and turns in "a clausula that concludes nothing." In very few pages, Benabou, addresses conflicting impulses between writing and reading, writing and living, following great models and being original. And he has a great deal of gentle self-deprecating fun while doing it. But this isn't just about the wordplay beloved of French modernists. At base it is a lovely book about the love of books and of language and all that goes into making them, be it paper or words. "Most of the words I used were already almost entirely detached from their natural ties to things, and for this reason I found them intoxicatingly light. The ones I loved the most (bergamot, nacelle, botargo, galoubet, caillebotis) were attached to nothing I had before my eyes. They were beautiful, shimmering, iridescent bubbles, and their emptiness made them all the more precious to me."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

A professor of ancient history at the University of Paris VII and the author of numerous works, Benabou reflects deeply and with sharp humor on the elusive nature of writing and writer's block in this work, originally published in France in 1986. Benabou's problem with writing comes from the way he defines "writing." He thinks of his predicament as applicable to quite a few people and makes no excuses for them; instead, he gives diverse critical reasons why he has not written any of the books he had conceived. Whenever he compares his writings to classical and contemporary authors, for example, he discovers only his own shortcomings despite his arduous efforts. But this book he did indeed write. Recommended for comprehensive public and academic collections.
Ali Houissa, Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 111 pages
• Publisher: Bison Books (March 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080326139X
• ISBN-13: 978-0803261396
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 4.8 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #665,852 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Arch and poignant metafiction (some will find insufferable), October 22, 2001

By	Stephen O. Murray "Stephen O. Murray" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This somewhat autobiographical sort of a novel, first published in French in 1986, won the Black Humor Prize. The most interesting part is a sketch of the author's background--as a child of a Sephardic Jewish family that had been in Morocco for four centuries. He assumed he was destined for greatness (as a writer) and sees this as a sort of ontogeny for the phylogeny of the Chosen People. Both as a 20th-century Jew and as someone who (like Camus) feels lost the paradise of living under the North African sun (living in the dingy, gray Paris of the 1950s), he believes he has a duty to remember.

The book about his nonbooks (the books he didn't write) starts over and starts over and starts over, but, aided by some very apposite quotations about writing from myriad other writers, details the ultimately impossible love of an author who can not bring himself to besmirch beautiful virgin sheets of white paper even to create the literature that would redeem his claim to be a writer.

Many people have realized that being unsuited for writing and even unable to string more than a few words together does not remove the desire to be a writer. Without venturing beyond the struggle with writing ) B?nabou makes being a writer who does not and cannot write archly funny and even poignant.