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javorstein's review against another edition
5.0
PHENOMENAL!!! love his use of conceptual figures throughout his poetry, and their evolution. i think about sarah and yukel all the time. jabès's notion of the book, well, all very derridean and whatnot, and felt a little language-centric, but i still loved his formulation of the jew/poet as always lost, in exile, the inherent connection between the modern jewish condition and exodus. easily political. great book
javorstein's review against another edition
5.0
same thoughts as vol. 1. loved the evolving figures throughout. the critique of the law (i.e. in contradistinction to talmudic 'law') felt very benjaminian/agambenian viz. deactivation, new weak use for the law, etc. moses as a figure of subversion of the law; the book as self-destructive; law containing its own subversion; the silence of hashem in the face of abram; the wound of writing in the face of the shoah. simply so many cool ideas that resonated a lot with me, especially the displacement from static identity and the permanent exile of the jewish figure.
penguin_horowitz's review against another edition
5.0
This is an overwhelmingly challenging book. Sometimes, when my mind was at its clearest, I was able to engage with much of what Jabes's dense, narratively frenzied poetry has to offer; other times, I was only able to pick out particularly resonant lines or even just absorb the musicality of the words themselves. For a book about words as words, any level of engagement felt appropriate, so I never felt upset that I was confused; the desperate struggle for clarity is at the center of Jabes's text, and I suspect most readers leave this book feeling perplexed and uncertain. Sitting in this uncertainty is certainly the challenging part.
catpdx's review against another edition
4.0
"A writer's life takes its sense through what he says, what he writes, what can be handed down from generation to generation."
"What is remembered is sometimes only one phrase, one line."
"There is the truth."
"But what truth?"
"If a phase or line survives the work, it is not the author who gave it this special change (at the expense of others): it is the reader."
"There is the lie."
"The writer steps aside for the work, and the works depends on the reader."
"So truth is, in time, the absurd and fertile quest of lies, which we pay with tears and blood."
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