"Ceci n'est pas un livre," declares the author of this mercurially
playful paradox of confessional literature, authorial awakening,
and creative endeavor. The French Benabou has, of course, written
many books, including ThrowAway This Book Before It's Too Late
(1992), and is the Definitively Provisional Secretary of surrealist
Raymond Queneau's Oulipo (Workshop for Potential Literature), an
experimental collective that has included Marcel Duchamp, Italo
Calvino, and Benabou's friend Georges Perec. The first section of
this peculiarly circular work has (following a series of
tongue-in-cheek introductions) as its opening sentence the line "In
the beginning, a short sentence." This turns out to be, in fact,
the book's conclusion. How Benabou got to this conclusion is
another story, which he obliquely recounts in the rest of "this
(quite real) nonbook." It involves an early love for secondhand
books and blank notebooks, progresses with uncertainty toward an
inchoate life as a writer, and stalls. After such metaliterary
hijinks and post-Romantic self-consciousness, Benabou restarts
himself, focusing on his family history (his ancestors were
Sephardic Jews resident in Morocco) and in particular on the
occasion when his great-grandfather appeared in a travelogue about
Morocco by Pierre Loti (the origin of his family's francophilia).
Benabou's inheritance is thus split several ways, among an "exotic"
Arabic background, Jewish heritage, and French acculturation, an
identity crisis further complicated by the influence-anxiety he
catches from numerous actual books. Before he's finished with his
search for the ideal, or potential, book, Benabou has juggled with
the ideas of Pascal, Borges, Walter Benjamin, and Derrida. A
hyperaware and erudite product of Gallic postmodernism, Benabou's
ludic essay dodges giddily among romantic notions of writing and
Parnassian ideals of literature. (Kirkus Reviews)
Marcel Benabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in
writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn,
meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a full
one accuses. Benabou knows the heroic joy of depriving critics of
victims, the kindness of sparing publishers decisions, and the
public charity of leaving more room in bookstore displays. "Why I
Have Not Written Any of My Books" (Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de
mes livres) provides both a respectful litany of writers' fears and
a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them.
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