LITERATURE

FICTION

**Two Books of Questions, One Opera and a Composition That Can Never Be Repeated (from Libraries of Sand)**

3AM Magazine, October 17, 2021

In early 1963, the prestigious French publisher Gallimard brought out Edmond Jabès’s Le Livre des Questions, a hybrid volume of aphorisms, poetry, dialogue and fiction — its author described it as a “récit éclaté” or “exploded story” — that would develop into a multi-volume series and have an enormous impact on contemporary thought and literature. As Paul Auster, himself a huge Jabès fan, observed in 1977, “During the past few years, no French poet has received more serious critical attention and praise than Edmond Jabès. Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jean Starobinski, and others have written extensively and enthusiastically about his work, and as time goes on the list continues to grow.” It was in the wake of dispossession and exile that Jabès forged the unconventional form of Le Livre des Questions, which drew so many enthusiastic responses: in 1957, after 44 years in Egypt, the land of his birth, he was driven out of the country along with vast numbers of other residents whose Jewish or “European” identity branded them as non-Egyptian.

**Companions of the Road (from Libraries of Sand)**

Fortnightly Review, June 27, 2021

IN THE SUMMER of 1935, Edmond Jabès and his wife Arlette travel to Paris on their honeymoon. They spend two months in the capital, staying at the Hotel Gallia, an elegant establishment in the 8th arrondissement near the Champs-Élysées. There is a certain symmetry in choosing France as their post-wedding destination since it was on a sea voyage from France to Egypt that they had first met, six years earlier.

**Castaways in Cairo: An Exercise in Bibliographic Archaeology (from Libraries of Sand)**

Fortnightly Review, September, 2020

A city is constituted by its buildings and their inhabitants, by its climate and its form of government, by its ghosts and its luck, and also by the lives of those people who pass through it, temporary residents, survivors from the shipwreck of modernity washed up on its shores, scrambling and hustling, hiding out, stuck, or making the most of a good thing as long as it lasts. For the first half of the twentieth century, Cairo, polyglot and cosmopolitan yet also ruthlessly exploited and riven with profound levels of inequality, had more than its share such castaways. Among them was Shlomo Narinsky, an artist who later adopted the single-name moniker Neroni. It was as Neroni that he created the cover design of Edmond Jabès’s third book of poetry, Maman (1932).

Varieties of Silence and Near Silence (from Libraries of Sand)

Jacket2, July 22, 2020

The aesthetic stridency of modernism was frequently accompanied by strong political stances, often with disastrous results. Among the innovative writers who managed to navigate the twentieth century without becoming entangled in its worst excesses was Francophone Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès (1912–1991). Did Jabès’s attitude toward language offer some degree of immunity from totalitarian attitudes? An inscription in a pamphlet Jabès published in Cairo in 1953 connects to a controversy that pitted Paul Celan and Milan Kundera against Paul Eluard; retracing this historic thread leads to an appreciation of writing that embraces the neutral and the ambient, a writing that courts silence.

**Counterpoint and Apocrypha (from Libraries of Sand)**

Bomb, Summer 2019

She is divisive, although history—meaning what people say to one another when a subject comes up, wanting to repeat something they’ve heard from or read by someone who presumably knows more about it than they do—tells us that Umm Kulthum was a universally beloved figure, at least during her quarter-century-long heyday when her concerts, broadcast the first Thursday of each month at 9:30 PM Cairo time, brought life to a stop throughout the Arab world. She divided critics, musicians, couples. She divided families, usually along generational lines, but not consistently. Sometimes it was the older people who hated her and the young ones who were intense fans; sometimes it was the young who couldn’t stand her and the elders who adored her.