"Not writing is always a relief and sometimes a pleasure. Writing
about what cannot be written, by contrast, is the devil's own job."
In this unusual text, a blend of essay, fiction, and literary
genealogy, South African novelist Ivan Vladislavic explores the
problems and potentials of the fictions he could not bring himself
to write. Drawing from his notebooks of the past twenty years,
Vladislavic records here a range of ideas for stories--unsettled
accounts, he calls them, or case studies of failure--and examines
where they came from and why they eluded him. In the process, he
reveals some of the principles that matter to him as a writer, and
pays tribute to the writers-- such as Walser, Perec, Sterne, and
DeLillo--who have been important to him as both a reader and an
author. At the heart of the text, like a brightly lit room in a
field of debris, stands Vladislavic's Loss Library itself, the
shelves laden with books that have never been written. On the page,
Vladislavic tells us, every loss may yet be recovered. An
extraordinary book about both the nature of novels and the process
of writing, The Loss Library will appeal to anyone seeking to
understand the almost magical and mythical experience of breathing
life into a new work of fiction. Praise for Vladislavic "In the
tradition of Elias Canetti, a tour de force of the
imagination."--Andre Brink "The prose is stunning. It gives the
impression of the words and the phrases having been caught from the
inside--as though the author lives on the other side of language,
where every word is strange and dancing, and the way they are put
together produces complicated patterned exchanges like
minuets."--Tony Morphet
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