The Book of Questions: El, or the Last Book - Hardcover

Jabès, Edmond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819551090 ISBN 13: 9780819551092

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 1984

Synopsis

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?

About this title

Review

..."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

"For anyone who is interested in the last frontiers of thought and language he is an irreplaceable writer."--Graham Martin, Times Literary Supplement

.,."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

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0819551090
• ISBN 13: 9780819551092
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 165