To Write on Tamara?

by Marcel Bénabou, Steven Rendall (Translation)

As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel Bénabou’s book is at once a memoir and a novel, a confession and a reflection on the prerogatives and imperatives of writing one’s story. At its center, forever alluring and elusive, is the beautiful and ethereal Tamara, the exact incarnation of our narrator’s most enduring fantasy—a femme fatale for the lover of form. Who precisely our narrator is, is less The young Manuel, who leaves his home in Morocco to study in Paris, only to encounter the enticing Tamara? Or the mature Manuel, looking back not only at Tamara but also at the younger man’s reading of his experience through the pages of the literature of sentimental apprenticeship, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black through Flaubert’s Sentimental Education? A heady, genre-defying high-wire act by a writer who delights in such undertakings and whose efforts consistently delight readers worldwide, To Write on Tamara? captures with graceful authority and assurance the now thrilling, now vexing complexities of living and writing life’s stories, especially stories of love.

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

"Emeritus professor of Roman history at the Paris Diderot University, Marcel Bénabou's work focuses on ancient Rome, in particular North Africa during Antiquity and acculturation and romanisation processes at work in these provinces.

A member of the "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle" (or OuLiPo) since 1969, which he joined one year after his friend Georges Perec, the following year he became the definitively provisional secretary. Since 2003 he combines this function with that of provisionally definitive secretary.

His Oulipian works often focus on the genesis of literary work and autobiography.

He appears in the guise of the lawyer Hassan Ibn Abbou in the novel La Disparition by his friend Georges Perec."

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written & painfully incisive, Bénabou's novel charts the amorous adventures of a young man who moves from Morocco to Paris for his schooling. The penetrating prose is spectacular in this translation by Steven Rendall, but the bulk of the story is weighed down with the anxiety of frustration, hesitation & missed opportunities, perhaps so painfully close to my own state of mind that I simply couldn't bear it. Tho the author is a member of the experimental writers' group OuLiPo, this work is almost shocking in its straightforwardness, a couple shifts of perspective aside. Also, due to certain details in the plot, the action ultimately places itself squarely in the realm of the Victorian novel despite the tangible air of excitement & discovery to be found as the protagonist expands his horizons & experience in the heady atmosphere of mid-20th century art & literature. A strange & exhilarating emotional mixed bag of a book.

[Tosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marcel Bénabou I think of him, as a writer's writer. He writes about writing, but in a narrative. Here he writes about a woman of a certain passion from his life (or is it?) named Tamara. From his memories and onward he focuses on the subject matter of love, literature and writing. It is also a work that thinks about the nature of writing and how it corresponds with one's life. While reading this, it didn't remind me of another book (oddly enough) but the later film-works of Jean-Luc Godard. Godard mostly does film-essays, and this book is "book-essay." Eros is always an interesting subject matter to me - especially when one looks back or comments on that subject matter from a distance that becomes close.