The Book Now Come
I ordered it on December 9th and today it arrived. So now it’s my Current Reading. So, unconfined joy. Blanchot’s The Book to Come is the final collection of essays to be translated into English. One only has to open to the author biography to realise that this is not the usual type of essay collection: “Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907. His life is wholly devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it.”
The book features two of his essays that I know well already, and are worth the price of admission alone (even if it is �17 plus p&p): The Experience of Proust and Where now? Who Now? (on Beckett�s Trilogy). However, the other versions have long been out-of-print.
When, last year, I mentioned that this edition was to appear, I also wondered if the “Brach” referred to on the blurb quoted by Amazon should be “Broch”. Sadly, it should. “Brach” still appears on the back of the volume while there is a long essay on Hermann Broch, author of The Death of Virgil. (The link here goes to The Complete Review’s page on the novel. This couldn’t be further from Blanchot’s own manner of talking about literature. He doesn’t give grades! Still, it’s very useful�)
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- The Book to Come
- The Sirens’ Song Lars Iyer�s latest essay Blanc…
- Val�ry’s Notebooks
- Blanchot Obit.
- Colloquy on Blanchot
