| Title | : | Death Sentence |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1886449414 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781886449411 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 81 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1948 |
Death Sentence Reviews
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"There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express".
-Samuel Beckett
I read Death Sentence with bated breath, for the prose is trembling with uneasiness and anxiousness as the narrator speaks with turmoil through the prose. It is superfluous to say that it is challenging to read and review. I ended up writing tens of pages of notes as this slim but dense novel comes to end. I did not feel writing anything even after that, for what is to be written about a book whose prose is so abstract, even though it is a novel, so anything to write about may across as a futile attempt. Nonetheless, I could not get over the tumultuous anxiety I have been feeling since I finished the book, and hence I am making the futile attempt.
The book is being written at the same time it is being read, it comes to being as words begin to defy the truth as if they have some inherent, innate being of their own and do not require any references, we see the traits of post-structuralism and post-modernism right through the first page of the novella. We see that narrator is afraid, to tell the truth, but words do not obey him, for, do words obey anyone, at all? The narrator wisely thinks to keep the truth hidden but, as we know, those who have troubled soul, they can not help themselves than to write so he hopes to do it with the tantalizing tremor after writing the book, but has he succeeded in it?
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Death Sentence is the tale our unnamed of the narrator's strange, pulsating liaisons with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. One of the most profound and piercing openings of the literature could be found in it. We have given quite a few clues about the tale of the first woman right from the starting. She belongs to a typical middle family, loses her father quite early and her mother could not really carry forward the expectations of livelihood of the house as she tastes failures, a little too many. The living proofs of these events are being provided by the narrator at regular intervals but we need to ask whether all these clues and information are necessary for the narrative, do these really lead us or mislead us?
Blanchot explores the enigma of death, but not in a mythical or metaphysical manner, he takes upon this crusade through the language, its limit, its potential; if a man should have died then everything that remains of his life is a reprieve, perhaps like a walking death? And is there anything more serious and profound than the death itself? We see the transformation of a dying person and one would acknowledge that one is reading a death sentence but it is really so or there is something more to it? Just then, the omnipotent narrator makes him/ her heard and you realize that the first part may be just a prologue to the actual Death Sentence.
"If you don’t kill me, the you are a murderer."
-Franz Kafka
Have you ever seen death?
“I have seen dead people, Miss”
“No death!” The nurse shook her head. “Well, soon you will see it.”
We see rumination over death throughout the prose, we may observe serene calmness after accepting the death, don’t we always know that death is a certainty of our world or perhaps we keep postponing it, not really looking into its probing eyes and accept the horror and pleasure of it? It is only eventually at the ultimate phase of our existence that we really accept it. Does being dead mean death or death is something more profound and more inconspicuous.
The narrator resolves not to cast any sort of veil over the truth, but what is truth and which truth he is speaking of? Is it the abstract, the ultimate truth, or anything specific to the event/s? Perhaps, we may have to look into the other book by Blanchot- The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays,in ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ he links literature to negation through the power of language to negate the reality of the thing. He says writing is a fearful spiritual weapon that negates the naïve existence of what it names and must therefore do the same to itself. Reading Blanchot is like taking on with the language, the literary text itself, his fiction is an obsessive attempt to say what is falsified in saying, his language may be elliptical, opaque, and oblong but it is the truest form of possible literary language possible in fiction.
I who am now speaking turn bitterly towards those silent days, those silent years, as towards an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, an most of all from myself, yet where I lived during a large part pf my life, without exertion, without desire, by a mystery which astonishes me now.
The prose is like pulsating ripples which dance with every action, every emotion of the narrator, characters but we see a serene calmness right, making the reader quiver over the breath-taking events, we see the influence of Kafka here, whose world is oblong, elliptical and paradoxical. The identity of the characters is not revealed instantaneously, it is being kept under the veil and only revealed gradually, and that too with initials, to produce Kafkaesque impact. It is not like that the text is filled with obscure vocabulary, it is just that the sentences are formed to convey a nauseatic impact on the reader. The black ink of the text seems to add eeriness to the prose. It fills the reader with anxiety and yet sends a strange sereness. The text of the novel is like an actual event happening right in front of the reader, making him/ her realize the impossibility of any tale being told or being told in a way that negates its own existence. You may have to read some of the sentences more than once since you feel that you are ignoring something but actually, you are not, it the structure of the sentences which emanate such effect. Blanchot says, Language perceives that its meaning derives not from what exists, but from its own retreat before existence. . . . If one is not to talk about things except to say what makes them nothing, well then, to say nothing is really the only hope of saying everything about them. He says that in language, any word points toward the idea of the object it is referring to than the actual object itself, in a way denying the existence of that object, in the text. For instance, if an author writes about a dog or cat, the word dog or cat refers to the idea of a dog or a cat rather than any actual dog or cat.
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However, Blanchot says, in the case of literature, the process is different than ordinary language, for it emphasizes the materiality of the word, shape, texture, tone, and rhythm and also its absence since it negates the object in the first place. So, we may understand that though the word negates the reality of the object it refers to, but reference substitute for the abovementioned loss of reality, which saves the literature from the absurdity of meaning something else than a dog when the word ‘dog’ is written, in a way, it refers to the possibility of the idea which is being referred. Therefore, the literature could also be read as words on a page without any reference and allusions besides, the normally accepted norms of it, we see in the novel. It is also this absence, the distance between the word and the idea, which allows the word to mean more than one thing, so that ‘dog’ never just means dog, what Blanchot calls the ‘image’, where words never just refer to what they mean, but to what they do not mean.
Neither light nor darkness have ever bothered me. A persistent thought is completely beyond the reach of its conditions. What has sometimes impressed me about this thought is a sort of hardness, the infinite distance between its respect for me and my respect for it; but hardness is not a fair word: the hardness arose form me, from my own person. I can even imagine this: that if I had walked by its side more often in those days, as I do now, if I had granted it the right to sit down at my table, and to lie down next to me, instead of living intimately with it for several seconds during which all its proud powers were revealed, and during which my own powers seized it with an even greater pride, then, we would not have lacked familiarity, nor equality in sadness, nor absolute frankness, and perhaps I would have known something about its intentions which even it could never have known, made so cold by my distance that it was put under glass, prey to one obstinate dream.
The book questions the very limit of language, as we think, we have control over language and we can communicate what we want to, through any language. But the language itself is not perfect since there is no such language that may express the truth of the world, however, various languages and cultures may allude to the truth, when assimilated together. We may comprehend then there is a double negation in the literature, firstly the object itself is negated and secondly the idea of that object, therefore, we say that language limits us from realizing the reality of things, as there is always a gap between the reality and idea of it, we may have. As we see that Kant has mentioned in Critique of Pure Reason that we construct a world of ideas that is the same as that of reality, and the words produce the fiction of a reality which we confuse with the actual reality. Blanchot investigates the absolute responsibility of an author to language, He has shown us that the void writing creates between itself and the world can never be filled adequately; the writer's hope to tell a story is futile. However, we see that literature can exist only in this space, this void.
Death Sentence may come across as meaningless, impenetrable, oblong text to most of the readers as his other fiction works may seem to be; however, we need to understand that it is the culmination of his theories, his thought process about the literature, the language itself. If one may go through his critical essays, his theories like The Gaze of Orpheus, The Writing of the Disasters , the one may easily realize that Death Sentence is not about a tale per se, it is about the process of writing a tale itself, it is like theory is being put into practice.
It wonders me and in fact, sends a chill through my spine, to think about that an author could write such a self-reflective, ontological text which is about the very process itself than anything else. I read a Station-Hill print of the book, translated by Lydia Davis but I felt that the book should have an introduction to the novel, especially when it was translated by such an acclaimed author.
It is true that I too felt irresponsible in this other language, so unfamiliar to me; and this unreal stammering, of expressions that were more or less invented, and whose meaning flitted past, far away from my mind, drew from me things I never would have said, or thought, or even left unsaid in real words: it tempted me to let them be heard, and imparted to me, as I expressed them, a slight drunkenness which was no longer aware of its limits and boldly went farther than it should have. -
What a strange, strange book!
Meandering thoughts are sometimes catching a story revolving around a person facing mortality and life in interaction, and then they move on, linger somewhere else and find the same, but different dichotomy in other people.
But is it really an opposition - life and death? They only make sense together, and facing death, we realise what life is. Does that mean that the time and circumstances of our death sentence modifies our life or at least our perception of life?
The woman who is "saved" from death temporarily may think so. The woman whose former partner is dead and who refuses to talk about him after engaging in a new relationship may also think that death redefined life.
And what about those mundane things we engage in that have absolutely no meaning in the face of death? Playing a part in a case of "saving honour" by the means of a duel, is that the biggest treason anyone can commit to the inner self, the narrator asks himself.
Death sentence ... that is our life, isn't it? Sentenced to life while waiting in death row. Don't waste that time stupidly. Or do. Just write some beautiful French sentences about life and death in the meantime. Or, faute de mieux, read Maurice Blanchot's beautiful Arrêt De Mort. It makes strange sense of the nonsense we call life. Or nonsense of the strange sense we call death. You choose. -
Who else but a Frenchman could have written something like this? What a strange, dark, profound, and utterly absorbing read this was: wounded with death and illness and nothingness.
Death Sentence certainly left its mark.
At 80 pages long I was transfixed from its first words to its last. I didn't move an inch.
Could see a fragment of Georges Bataille in there, and maybe even some Sartre and Kafka, but at the same time Blanchot has written something wholly his own, and I can't think of much else like it. It might not mean diddly-squat to some, but I loved it, even though it did leave me with an unpleasant feeling upon finishing it. -
What makes it happen that every time my grave opens, now, I rouse a thought there that is strong enough to bring me back to life? The very derisive laughter of my death.
His "living" proof of events will die before he does. Plaster casts of four hand puppets futures in artificial life support. J. first, a dying life and an undying living. She must be closest to death when they feel she is going to live and precipiced to life when it isn't over for the others already. I didn't wonder that after at least ten years of this her mother didn't stop her own life before it. J. is gallivanting about town, in lively laughter. It's true that the doctor told him and J. that it was incredible that they were both ticking on past their eat-by dates. He believes him about her but I don't know. I couldn't help notice that whenever the nurse isn't in the room (didn't she have to eat, and use the toilet, or sleep?!) J. loses her shit. Her sickbed bravery was losing it's hold each time. I can't stand the higher status shit, for any reason. I paid attention to this before her reverse youth effect. Days and future's yesterday shadow her head on the pillow. Love's if I can't have you no one can unlove version of life's pall. "Have you seen death?" her sister asks. Life support surrogacy for me. They are losing to hers. A fever drug on her beautiful face. Maybe she can hear higher songs in an off hook existence. But everybody dies, even her mother, even her older sister who lives off the kindness of gentlemen (I wanted to follow the sister and find out how it went down). He takes the substitute J. hands to fortune tellers and they tell that she will live. Once a time he brings her to life. In his arms a miracle. The oxygen balloon as the perfect rose. Quick, the perfect rose. He loves me, he loves me not. Waiting for Him. Her back to Him when he says maybe you should go ahead and kill yourself. Not what she wanted to hear. J. only has a couple of lines to write in her goodbyes now that He is out of them. I was touched by how little she had to leave behind. She's an orphan to herself in nothing to give. If he could save her that time why not this time. Maybe she could have lived one last time. But to subsist on the right words alone.... I would hate it more than anything to be that kind of dying, the living on dying. I don't know, it doesn't feel like it lasts. To give anything importance.... to say it will end one day isn't what gives it any meaning to me. She tells her doctor that if he doesn't kill her he will kill her. I felt like she was the killer in turning everything around her into a waiting room.I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain, that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe.
The women come into his room by mistake. He says that a person can enter the room of another person so long you don't have too many reasons for doing it. I find it much, much worse to stomp around as a sun always threatening to set so that all other suns won't rise. He never loves them more than when they are going to die. The one time he wouldn't see N(athalie) in the hospital so he couldn't be envious of her sick bed only made me squirm more. A neighbor in his hotel, Colette, sobs for hours in her room. Sadness he doesn't know the source. Once he dismisses her. I can't imagine which kind of person he thought she was to not be moved by her. I know this kind of sadness that doesn't have a face to express its own despair to itself. If the no face could see itself, or hear itself. There's something about a howling that is a life of its own because any audience or lack of is only part of the void.
S(imone) had been married and she wants to be married again, as if that would make the first marriage as never happened. She has parameters she believes in with all of her heart that they will work to keep her from plummeting into bad memories and fear statues. My copy of Death Sentence had a previous owner. Well, this previous owner wrote notes (in glittering gel blue) that he was not human because he didn't want to get married. One day he is speaking to Nathalie of many languages in her first born and in this tongue it sounds like a good idea. A balloon inside of time so outside of it feeling. Longing, lengthening, eclipsed on mirror side underbelly below. You know, he doesn't mean it forever. I don't see how getting married isn't any more or less a thought than the peoplethoughts and lifethoughts that keep him going on a wheel that only knows its spokes. The idea doesn't see itself out. Neither one of them are inherently more the future than the other. One could be happiness the same as the other.As for me, I have not been the unfortunate messenger of a thought stronger than I, nor its plaything, nor its victim, because that thought, if it has conquered me, has only conquered through me, and in the end has always been equal to me.
If it were me I could have gone back to thinking about when Nathalie would give ten years of her own life to her daughter Christiana so that she could go on and need someone else. How he can think of someone else by seeing them in another woman on a bus. Or the thirteen year old girl who watches him over his door, a disembodied head. The push and pull back towards him. To be the land and the haunting was everything to me about Death Sentence. I don't believe in being safe in the same way he did. I have tried to learn tricks to not feel sick about people shit that happens. But I don't want to have do's and don'ts and then spend always trying to make water a shape it could be (but could be something else). I have thought about this a lot, that real world size that makes the right before you think you're going to leap into forgetting feeling amputated. I don't believe that if he had stayed with any of these women it would have been a normal life. I don't believe in the strings that exorcise, not really. Just the possibility of muting is fearful, and the potential to never move again from one place. But when it was me, and when it still is (time stops in dread for each and every real life chore) it is the longing for the preexistence of stories, the breathing in between the lines of books that I love more than anything ever. I don't want the me that is being a "real" person either. I know it's not really a choice. The misery is in the sympathy with the cold body, the warm imprint around anywhere else you'd rather be. A can't stand either one and wanting and hating them both. Now it is his hands. A life support on paper.And what is more, let him try to imagine the hand that is writing them: if he saw it, then perhaps reading would become a serious task for him.
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The first half is narrator talking about his dying wife, J. - who strangely looked more and more like a child closer she got to death and even came back to life after her first death once. J.'s reactions to her own approaching death
"Every minute stolen from solitude and fear was an inestimable boon for J. She fought with all her strength for one single minute: not with supplications, but inwardly, though she did not wish to admit it. Children are that way: silently, with the fervor of hopeless desire, they give orders to the world, and sometimes the world obeys them. The sickness had made a child of J.; but her energy was too great, and she could not dissipate it in small things, but only in great things, the greatest things."
.....or narrator's attitude towards her (or later as he tries to get over death) seem to justify the title.
"The only difference, and it was a large one, was that I was living in proud intimacy with terror; I was too shallow to see the misery and worthlessness of this intimacy, and I did not understand that it would demand something of me that a man cannot give. My only strong point was my silence. Such a great silence seems incredible to me when I think about it, not a virtue, because it in no way occurred to me to talk, but precisely that the silence never said to itself: be careful, there is something here which you owe me an explanation for, the fact that neither my memory, nor my daily life, nor my work, nor my actions, nor my spoken words, nor the words which come from my fingertips ever alluded directly or indirectly to the thing which my whole person was physically engrossed in. I cannot understand this reserve, and I who am now speaking turn bitterly towards those silent days, those silent years, as towards an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, and most of all from myself, yet where I have lived during a large part of my life, without exertion, without desire, by a mystery which astonishes me now. I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It i a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo."
The narrator even agreed to her once that her death was long overdue. And it was all so powerful until J. died for second time, after that though prose sustained its beauty, the story seemed to fall apart as we see Narrator trying to get over the loss of his wife through different cognitive responses - running away (choosing to live in hotels instead of his own place); being violent towards a woman to carry out frustration, indulging in self-delusion (because reality was too much) etc in a number of apparently unrelated incidences and thus some of the negative reviews here.
"As for me, I have not been the unfortunate messenger of a thought stronger than I, nor its plaything, nor its victim, because that thought if it has conquered me, has only conquered through me, and in the end has always been equal to me. I have loved it and I have loved only it, and everything that happened I wanted to happen, and having had regard only for it, wherever it was or wherever I might have been, in absence, in unhap- piness, in the inevitability of dead things, in the necessity of living things, in the fatigue of work, in the faces born of my curiosity, in my false words, in my deceitful vows, in silence and in the night, I gave it all my strength and it gave me all its strength, so that this strength is too great, it is incapable of being ruined by anything, and condemns us, perhaps, to immeasurable unhappi- ness, but if that is so, I take this unhappiness on myself and I am immeasurably glad of it and to that thought I say eternally, “Come,” and eternally it is there."
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"People who are silent do not seem admirable to me because of that, nor yet less friendly. The ones who speak, or at least who speak to me because I have asked them a question, often seem to me the most silent, either because they evoke silence in me, or because, knowingly or unknowingly, they shut themselves up with me in an enclosed place where the person who questions them allies them with answers that their mouths do not hear." -
خودم را تنها در اتاقی حبس کرده ام. درون و بیرون خانه هیچ کس نیست. اما این تنهایی, خود سخن گفتن آغاز کرده , و من هم باید از این تنهایی که سخن می گوید, سخن بگویم, نه به قصد تمسخر, بلکه بدین دلیل که در ورای این تنهایی, تنهایی بزرگ تری مترصد فرصت نشسته است و در ورای این یکی, باز یکی بزرگ تر از آن, و هر یک کلام را در بر می گیرد تا خفه و خاموشش کند, ولی به جای این کار, کلام را در نامتناهی منعکس می کند و نا متناهی انعکاس کلام می شود.
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Czytanie tej książki było ciekawym doświadczeniem, jednak darzę ją bardzo mieszanymi uczuciami.
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A very, very interesting read!
Easy to read and very short so I recommend you to try it!
This book begins very intriguing, with the writer saying he is going to tell about events (in 1938) that were such, that he never could write about them earlier on. That everything he has ever written before was an attempt to write about these events, but that words had been cunning and deceiving. And now he wanted to make an end to it and was going to tell you all bluntly, freely and openly. I was captured right away.
Then he starts telling about one of the events. You have no idea what to expect, what to think and what is exactly going on. I got such a strange sense of it all, because of the way it is written. There is so little context, you don't know who the people are, what they look like, what the places where the events take place look like. Sometimes there is a mention of Paris or a hotel room, but no descriptions. So what you are mostly reading are effects of encounters and the interpretations of the storyteller. But these are often "relative" or "subjective". The writer does this is such a good way that you just have to read the book to feel how strange it is: it is mysterious, intriguing, but at the same time stupid and boring. Another thing is that you feel someone is trying so hard to tell you something as accurate and truthful possible, yet you feel betrayed and in the dark. The effect of how language is not sufficient and exact is so clearly communicated here. For example sometimes it is suggested that something might have been because of this or that, but only if that or this. So you still don't know why. Or he tells something as a "fact" which is not a fact but his interpretation. Or he starts telling something that seems essential, yet is incomprehensible, like:
"Besides, it is certain that she was extremely attached to me, and she was becoming more so every day: but what does the word attachment refer to? And the word passion - what does it mean? And the word ecstasy? Who has experienced the most intense feeling? Only I have, and I know that it is the most glacial of all, because it has triumphed over an immense defeat, and is even now triumphing over it, and at each instant, and always, so that time no longer exists for it.".
First: why is it so certain that she is attached?? And by the end I don't even know which of the feelings he is still talking about? And what immense defeat? What does this all even mean?
Themes in this book include mortality, morbidity, the obscure, the feeling of entrapment, isolation, failure to connect, self destructive behaviour. Relationships seem to be doomed, not only because of the themes above, but mostly because only the unattainable is sought for.
I guess the book is more writing, philosophy and idea driven. So i don't recommend it if you always need a plot to enjoy your books...
You can start reading it here and if interested get the book:
http://elearning.zaou.ac.zm:8060/Fict... -
Salonski.
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The writing is enigmatic? The book an enigma? But as much as we try to refute it by all our, isms, attitudes, adherences, isn’t this what existence is? Within the eighty pages of this novella cries out the entrapment of our lives caught between this and the smoked breath of death.
Our protagonist-narrator not only walks us into the face of death, its all consuming fears but takes our arm and leads us directly into the cross threads of the experience of enigmatic life through the truth of his style. These parts are difficult reading, tough sledding, but we get from those pages the unwrapped experience of life shredded down to its core.
He battles this through his unending search for freedom. His inner and inward struggles for understanding while undermining his attempts by the means of his search. The story the narrator is trying to get across? One of his? The revolving door of us human critters and our sense that we can reach that land, promised or not, by what we know rather than encounter the enigma that awaits uncomfortably beyond.
The book was uncomfortable and difficult for me. I bogged down not the book yet now grateful that I plowed through. Within its eighty pages it contained greater width and length, a greater depth and breadth, than other books that I have read. So, bundle up, bring a supply of food and of water, and open the first page. -
Eh....? your guess is as good as mine. I have almost no idea what that was all about. It feels like the literary equivalent of a David Lynch film. I gave 3-stars just because it does cause some reactions in the mind which is more than you can say about every book.
My theory is that its about but i mean, i really don't know what else to make from it.
My original thought was that he was a :lol . -
Okay, so something was going on in this book with strange people doing strange things in strange rooms in strange hotels in the city of Paris as it falls under German attack in the early days of WW2, etc. and so on...
At least that's what I think is going on. Blanchot releases a torrent of words carry you through a series of events and thoughts and musings and self-reflections and detours and sidebars and words on top of words. In the end, you're where you started, but it's hard to say where you've been, if anywhere.
Recommended for those who are into literary motormouthedness... if you're into story, look elsewhere. -
DNF
Aborrecido. -
Ovo je ubijanje smrti na stepenicama koje nemaju početka ni kraja; udar slovnog udava što gmiže po zagušljivim sobama umirućih. Uštrikani bezdan, bez priče.
Nema ovde ni filozofskog romana, lirske proze, pripovetke, anti-romana, niti strukture.
Ovo je, prosto, tekst i sve drugo obmanjuje. Zamućen, od Dunava mutniji.
Blanširanje teksta koje je preteča poststrukturalizma.
(Blanširanje je anti-balzamovanje.)
Gde je balzamovanje tu je smrt, a gde je smrt tu je i pitanje života kao narativnog i biološkog fenomena, ali i pitanje autorstva – stvoritelja i stvorenog.
Dakle, ko hoće, ovde će naći bebu Deridu rođenog u kupusu. I Barta na noši.
Ko voli Anrija Mišoa, Albera Karakoa ili, eventualno, Levinasa (Blanšoovog najboljeg prijatelja), uživaće. Ostalima može da se uputi samo vrlo obazriva, čak pomalo odbijajuća preporuka.
I da, jedna od umirućih je Kolet.
„Jedan pogled mnogo se razlikuje od onoga što se za njega veruje da on jeste, on nema ni svetla ni izraza, niti sile, ni pokreta, on je ćutljiv, ali njegova tišina, iz središta čudnovatosti prelazi svetove, i onaj koji je čuje postaje neko drugi.” (80) -
بلانشو تکرار می کند ولی ملال آور نمی شود. کیفیت ترجمه برای این نوع متن پایین بود و ارتباط با مولف را مختل می کرد.
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I've come to the conclusion that Maurice Blanchot is not for me, and I have to wonder who his writing is for. After all, he is a Frenchie weirdo, prone to violent political swings, who wrote abstract novels that engaged strongly with critical theory, and often draws comparisons to Bataille and Kafka. This should be a sign of endorsement. The difference is that with Bataille and Kafka, their experiments seem to have an end goal, or a fascinating way of rupturing language. Death Sentence was an absolute slog. I kept waiting for an insight of some kind, some way of indicating that Blanchot deserved his reputation, and while I remember at least kind of liking Thomas the Obscure back when I was a 21 year old theoryhead, I have to question my memory, and wonder whether my enthusiasm was merely a product of my theoryheadedness. Older and more sober-minded, I now suspect that Blanchot, like Gertrude Stein, is only famous because of who he palled around with.
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#ادبیات_فرانسه 🇲🇫
حکم مرگ
نویسنده: موریس بلانشو
مترجم: احمد پرهیزی
نشر: مروارید
برشی از کتاب
آنچه گویاست دقیقه ی اکنون است و دقیقه ای دیگر که از پی آن می آید. سایه ی دنیای دیروز هنوز برای کسانی که به آن پناه می برند جاذبه دارد. اما آن نیز محو خواهد شد و جهان آینده همچون بهمنی بر سر خاطرات گذشته فرود می آید.
و اما قصه از چه قراره
تصویر روی جلد و اسم کتاب گویای بخشی از داستانه، راوی کتاب برامون از اتفاقاتی میگه که ۹ سال قبل تر از زمانی که تصمیم به نوشتنش میکنه افتاده. معشوقه ای که به بستر مرگ میوفته. اما حرف از یک زن، یا معشوقه نیست.
دنبال این نباشید که با یه داستان شسته روفته رو یه خط صاف
با پایان طرف باشید. بلانشو قشنگ میکشوندت وسط ذهن خودش. انگار خودشم نمیدونه بنویسه یا نه! تناقض های که بلانشو میخواد باهاش مارو
به چالش بکشه مخصوصن کسایی که به نوشتن فکر میکنن یا میشه گفت ادبیاتی و نویسنده اند.
داستانی سراسر اندوه، تاریکی، غصه و اما مرگ.
من میگم اینا تلخ و سیاه نیست، شیرینه چون واقعیته. اما آیا واقعن موریس بلانشو زندگی رو دوست داره یا مرگ؟ احتمالن در حین خوندن این سوالیه
که براتون پیش میاد؟
بعد سالها این کتاب دوباره تجدید چاپ شده. حتمن یادداشت مترجم و چند صفحه آخر سخنرانی "ژاک دریدا" توو روز سوزندن جسد بلانشو، به خوبی از موریس حرف زده رو بخونید کمک زیادی میکنه برای درک بهتر قلم نویسنده و این کتاب. دریدا میگه: بلانشو همیشه دائم به مرگ فکر میکرد و نوشته هاش شاهد اینن که تا لحظه آخر زندگی رو ترجیح میداد. برام خیلی جذاب شد حس کردم چقدر دوست دارم بیشتر باهاش آشنا بشم.
راستی چقدر بلانشو و آثارش رو میشناسید؟
telegram.me/marco_ketab -
When I was reading Maurice Blanchot's Aminadab, I'd heard that that was his last "novel", and sure enough, this is an unravelable essay-memoir-story, meandering through apparent memories and introspection, though difficult to judge as actual truth or falsehood. Honestly, the whole here eludes me somewhat but many individual sequences and reflections on mortality and happenstance glisten on their own. Though it's seeming even more diffuse now that I've been away for a month of road-tripping since I read it. I'm sure that it deserves more than two stars, but until I can make some sense of it, I'm rather shut out of greater appreciation.
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It's surprising to find an author who writes so well yet cannot construct a simple story. This book suffers from the common ailments of contemporary literature : its meaning is hidden behind a jumble of random stories told in a stream-of-consciousness manner in a non-existent narrative. What ever happened to good stories? Why can't contemporary ideas be put into forms that are at least pleasing to read? When it's a chore to get through a book because there is so little content, I think it's time to start looking somewhere else for good literature...
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Blanchot pany!
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Video review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKYS1... -
On the surface, Blanchot's report deals with the relationships of the narrator with four women, and the role of death in their lives. There is a fair amount of plain narrative that might or might not have symbolic significance -- I usually care little about these things.
What I found compelling however is the undercurrent, the attempt to assign life and personality to non-living entities like paths
(Malheur au sentier qui se retourne pour dévisager le passant...) that turn back to examine the person walking it, or even to thoughts: Mais, une pensée n’est pas tout à fait une personne, même si elle agit et vit comme elle.
This culminates in recurring discussions of the infinite, which needs to be filled (in order that life continues?):
Avoir perdu le silence, le regret que j’en éprouve est sans mesure. Je ne puis dire quel malheur envahit l’homme qui une fois a pris la parole. Malheur immobile, lui-même voué au mutisme ; par lui, l’irrespirable est l’élément que je respire. Je me suis enfermé, seul, dans une chambre, et personne dans la maison, au-dehors presque personne, mais cette solitude elle-même s’est mise à parler, et à mon tour, de cette solitude qui parle, il faut que je parle, non par dérision, mais parce qu’au-dessus d’elle veille une plus grande qu’elle et au-dessus de celle-ci une plus grande encore, et chacune, recevant la parole afin de l’étouffer et de la taire, au lieu de cela la répercute à l’infini, et l’infini devient son écho.
(I feel an immense regret over having lost the silence. I cannot say what pain a man feels who has begun to speak. Unremovable misfortune, itself sworn to silence; because of it the unbreathable is the element which I breathe. I have locked myself alone in a room, nobody is in the house, outside almost nobody, but this solitude itself has begun to speak, and at my turn it is necessary that I talk of this solitude that speaks, not to ridicule it, but because above it watches a greater solitude, and above that still a greater one, and everyone, after receiving the word to suffocate and silence it, instead reverberates ad infinitum, and the infinite becomes its echo.
I sense a deep seriousness in this attempt to transcend the reality of death, but there is a (deliberate?) disconnect between the actions of the narrator (which can mostly be considered as failures), and his compulsive inner life, which leave me, the reader, a little lost. -
No consigo hallar palabras dignas de una reseña de Blanchot. Una vez más, me deja aturdida y abatida a la vez su lucidez y la precisión en su lenguaje para dar trasladado de la angustia ante todo lo mortífero.
Imposible leer “La sentencia de muerte” sin caer «en un estado de inmovilidad más propio de una persona yacente que de una persona viva.» -
شاید انجام چنین کاری اشتباه بود -از سوی دیگر این اوضاع و احوال و تفسیر من از آنها برای من تنها وسیله ی ماندن چند پگاه دیگر در سرزمین چیزهای روایت کردنی و تجربه کردنی است-اشتباه من،اشتباه فاحش من، رفتار کردن مطابق قواعد جهان بود
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"That is what makes it so bitter: it seems to have the cruelty of something that gnaws at you, that catches hold of you and entices you, and it actually does catch hold of you, but that is also its secret, and one who has enough sympathy to abandon himself to this coldness finds in it the kindness, the tenderness, and the freedom of a real life."
I read this once and then once again because I felt lost in Blanchot's thoughts and believed my reaction to the first reading was due to a lapse in concentration. After the second read, I realized that was not the case. Blanchot pulls you into his thoughts, which are not quite chaotic but rather swarming and folding over each other like the waves in a busy sea. I felt as though the second part was a reaction to the first in that the narrator appears to be more of a spectator to the events unfolding between the speaker and J-- whereas the second part immediately develops into a far more perceptual recount of experiences. The speaker is haunted by his experience in his insistence to explain, yet he never truly explains the story he promises to provide. Instead, he unleashes his demons and falls into the same spells of thought he was trapped in before. I often had to reread paragraphs to remember how a character or situation was introduced because he glides through events so gracefully that they hardly make an impact. What does leave a mark are his meditations on himself, characters, situations, and thought. He questions everything and in turn, drags you into those thoughts. Rather than reading a story, I felt as though I was stumbling around in his mind, moving towards something far in the distance but instead catching myself in pits of wonder and contemplation.
Even more beautiful than the crafting of this staggered narrative are the meditations themselves. I've been told to read the original French and use Lydia Davis' translation as a trot (at least to read the French of the last and first few pages of the 2nd part), and I intend to do so following this reading; however, the translated descriptive language works wonders in pulling you in and bringing up the complexity of obligation versus action in moments of urgency. I loved the play on death and that he begins by ruminating on the dying of one soul only to find himself in her shoes in the second part. Furthermore, just as he felt himself dying and losing his hold on the world, he later finds himself involved with a body whose life, warmth, and energy has been completely drained. The story is full of this repetition, illustrating to me the speaker's desire to make sense of it all.
It's often hard to keep track of what is truth and what is metaphor because he blends the two together so beautifully that it is easy to see everything as a symbol, and this is where I realized I could sympathize with the speaker's longing to explain the unexplainable (especially when the thinker muses on thought itself). You meet and understand him through the union of his musings and your own. My confusions met his, and the moments in which I felt satisfied and grounded where those in which he was lost in thought, perhaps also struggling to find ground in what he sought to explain. I realized rather than struggling to put everything together and seek the answers he was also attempting to find, I was better off digesting the story piece by piece and following his recollective journey. (It reminded me a bit of Nabokov's Transparent Things )
This is an intricate, short work that should be read and savored by any curious mind. It held me in thought for many moments, though it did not amaze me. Perhaps after reading the French (if I can manage to), my impression will enhance. -
Czytając tę książkę, byłam uważna jak Anna Karenina w pociągu, więc nie będę jej oceniać. Na pewno wrażenie robi meandryczny, ale precyzyjny język i sceny, które przekraczają realizm w bardzo subtelny, iskrzący się znaczeniami sposób. Trudno mi jednak nie uznać tej małej prozy za jakąś ciekawostkę na marginesie, dlatego nie czuję szczególnej potrzeby zaczynania na nowo z większą uwagą.
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متاسفانه ترجمه ي خوبي از بلانشو نبود. ترجيح ميدم متن اصلي رو
بخونم و بعد ريويو رو آپديت كنم. -
3.5 stars. A unique, odd, original, easy to read, plotless, 80 page book of two narrative sections. The first narrative describes the struggle and treatment of a terminally ill woman. The second narrative is about the narrator’s interactions with three other women during the occupation and bombing of Paris in 1940.
The narrator feels the inadequacy of words to capture the complexity of particular events, yet he is compelled to write.
This book is recommended to readers interested in the development of fiction writing.
This book was first published in 1948. -
Found a copy of this List book online
HERE.
It starts out with the narrator basically confessing that he's trying to write about something that he's had bottled up inside of him forever. And, through the whole book, there's an odd, mysterious aspect that makes you THINK he's going to tell you the secret. But, then he just goes off on some other tangent in some other timeline with some other woman...
I felt stiffed. No story? No plot? No ending? WTF??? -
For anyone reading these reviews: IGNORE the positive reviews! This book is pompous mental masturbation of the highest order, except that unlike with other post-modern novels, there is absolutely nothing to gain from reading it. No memorable lines, no interesting characters. The book is only 81 pages, which meant I should have been able to read it in a day. The writing was so obnoxious that it took me 5 days to read it because I could only force myself to read <20 pages per day.
I HIGHLY recommend that you do NOT read this book!
