Volume 24, Number 7 · April 28, 1977
Story of a Scream
By Paul Auster
The Book of Questions
by Edmond Jabès, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop
Wesleyan University Press, 175 pp., $4.95 (paper)
During the past few years, no French poet has received more serious critical attention and praise than Edmond Jabès. Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean Starobinski, and others have written extensively and enthusiastically about his work, and as time goes on the list continues to grow. Beginning with the first volume of Le Livre des Questions, which was published in 1963, and continuing on through the other seven volumes in the series,[*] Jabès has created a new and mysterious kind of literary work—as dazzling as it is difficult to define. Already his writings have been given such a central place in France that Derrida has been able to state, flatly and without self-consciousness, that 'in the last ten years nothing has been written in France that does not have its precedent somewhere in the texts of Jabès.' Rosmarie Waldrop's translation of The Book of Questions can therefore be taken as an event of considerable importance.
Review, 2785 words
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