Stephen Mitchelmore Oracle Night is the first Paul Auster novel I’ve read since Leviathan in 1992. Until then, I had read every book. This was not a difficult feat. Auster is supremely readable. In fact, I am afflicted by an unusual inability to stop reading him once a book is begun. However, in the end, […]
Maurice Blanchot – Nowhere Without No
Stephen Mitchelmore Not half way through the year but already a book has come along that, at the end, I will say: this is it – the book of the year. I am aware that there is something desperate about such a pronouncement. It reveals a need to fulfil empty time with an evasive monument. […]
Cees Nooteboom – All Souls’ Day
Stephen Mitchelmore "The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way that ought to lead there." Maurice Blanchot How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel, asks it too. He thinks […]
Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation : The Absent Voice
Stephen Mitchelmore on the writing of Maurice Blanchot There are many remarkable facts about the long life of the French novelist and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. The strident – perhaps Fascist – nationalism of his pre-War journalism; his near-death at the hands of the Nazis during the war; his reclusive devotion to writing that is similar […]
Timothy Clark – Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger
Stephen Mitchelmore The Routledge Critical Thinkers series is turning into something special. Maurice Blanchot by Ulrich Haase and William Large, published last year, is a profound and miraculously lucid guide to the French writer’s work. This year we have Timothy Clark’s introduction to the work of a major influence on Blanchot: the German philosopher Martin […]
Gilles Deleuze: Proust And Signs
Stephen Mitchelmore This isn’t a new book. The French original was published in 1964 and in English eight years later. But don’t dismiss it as out-of-date. Like the book it analyses, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it pitches the reader into the future with a rare vigour. Buy this re-issue and give your […]
Paul Celan : After The Disaster
Stephen Mitchelmore explores the post-Holocaust poetry of Paul Celan “With a variable key you unlock the house in which drifts the snow of that left unspoken. Always what key you choose depends on the blood that spurts from your eye or your mouth or your ear. You vary the key, you vary the word that […]
E.M Cioran: To Infinity And Beyond
Stephen Mitchelmore explains why the writing of E.M. Cioran refuses explanation “Nothing is more irritating than those works which ‘co-ordinate’ the luxuriant products of a mind that has focused on just about everything except a system.” What is there to know about Emile Cioran? He was born in Romania, in 1911, the son of a […]
