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what is written.
In the opening chapter, the narrator – who is Roubaud
himself, more or less, although more or less is
perhaps an infinity I can only hope to overlook here – is
at his desk at five in the morning, drinking coffee. He
listens to the running motor of a delivery truck in the
street below. Immediately, we are with him in the cool
solitude of dawn. We reflect in isolation from the world
in motion; it becomes five o’clock in the morning for
us too. (Scott Fitzgerald says “In the real dark night of
the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day
after day”; at five o’clock, one begins to write about it).
The narrator tells us that he writes:
“in minute, close-packed letters, without deletions,
regrets, reflection, imagination, impatience” and that
he is writing “only in order to keep on going, to elude
BUY Jacques Roubaud books online from and
the anguish awaiting me once I break off.”
His anguish is inevitable, for a reason that soon
becomes clear. Writing holds anguish at bay. Reading
and sleep help too, he says. They provide the local
palliative of ‘escapism’. What we read, though, is not
in the form of traditional writerly escapism; a crime
thriller, perhaps, or maybe a philosophical abstraction
cast from an ivory tower, or even the ‘talking cure’ of
confessional memoir. It’s difficult to say what kind of
book it is. Yes, it is a novel, even if I found my copy
in the History section of a remaindered bookshop. Yet
while it partakes of the liberating playfulness of fiction,
it also looks back – ever so obliquely, yet ever so insistently
– into his pool of anguish: the sudden, premature
death of Alix, his wife. And this really happened. It’s
no fiction. �
418
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