Death Sentence
Maurice Blanchot
Language: English
Pages: 82
ISBN: 1886449414
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II, is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism, writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit.
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memory, nor my daily life, nor my work, nor my actions, nor my spoken words, nor the words which come from my fingertips ever alluded directly or indirectly to the thing which my whole person was physically engrossed in. I cannot understand this reserve, and I who am now speaking turn bitterly towards those silent days, those silent years, as towards an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, and most of all from myself, yet where I have lived during a large part of my life,
of this more or less empty and neglected. I was only allowed to go into one small room, doubtless the only habitable one. Yet in my mind there is the image of a large rotunda, quite beautiful and well kept up, but perhaps in another building. Nathalie worked; she translated writings from all sorts of different languages, at least from German, English, and Russian. That was an aspect of her character which helped to mislead me about her. For me, the fact that she worked in an office, that she 55
with each passing minute and which went beyond any purpose, turning me into a wanderer in search of nothing. I returned to the neighborhood of the Ministry. I was acting on the idea that if she was to be found anywhere, it would be near the river: an idea which appealed to me only because it was unreasonable, since Natalie was disgusted by suicide. I stayed there for an infinitely long time. I recall nothing about that person who spent so many hours on a bridge. The night, it seems to me, was
was necessary, wasn’t it? ” It really seemed that my acquiescence reverberated in her, that it had been in some way expected, with an immense expectancy, by an invisible responsibility to which she lent only her voice, and that now a supreme power, sure of itself, and happy—not because of my consent, of course, which was quite useless to it, but because of its victory over life and also because of my loyal understanding, my unlimited abandon—took possession of this young person and gave her an
moment on, but perfectly natural, gay and almost completely recovered. The first words she spoke, though, were somewhat distressing. In themselves they weren’t; and now that I have just written that they were, I can’t really understand why. “How long have you been here?” Those were the words she spoke almost immediately. It could be that I had just realized the strangeness of the situ20 ation, and something of that strangeness came through her words. But I believe her voice itself was still a
