The Book of Questions: Volume I [I. The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book]

by Edmond Jabès, Rosmarie Waldrop (Translator)

I. The Book of Questions
II. The Book of Yukel
III. Return to the Book

Genres: Poetry, Philosophy, France, Religion, Fiction, French Literature, Judaism

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Edmond Jabes was a major voice in French poetry in the latter half of this century. An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing, and he was one of the most significant thinkers of what one might call poetical alienation. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. (This is summarized from the reader's description in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier.) Very many of Jabes's books of prose and poetry have been translated into English, including The Book of Dialogue ( Wesleyan, 1987) and The Book of Margins (Chicago, 1993), both translated by Rosmarie Waldrop.

Reviews

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions lingers at the edges of fiction, revealing itself as if by the intermittent sweep of a lighthouse torch. It darts around the story of Sarah and Yukel, a young couple, possibly living, possibly already dead, who have been separated in the concentration camps of World War II, but whose plight surprisingly feels secondary compared to their attempts – and the attempts of innumerable ancient rabbis – to make sense of the world around them on a much greater scale. Thousands of years have shaped these two, to the point that the future seems to loop around behind them, melding with the past, reducing the present to nothing more than the time in which the next question is asked – a question that is merely a restatement of all the questions that have preceded it, and a refraction of questions as yet unasked.

It is common for a work of literature to meet the reader partway – revealing itself in a manner that encourages the reader by engaging in familiar conventions, following customary structures, using established concepts. The idea of the author meets the interpretation of the reader on the page, each doing its share of the work. Of course there are exceptions – Finnegans Wake achieves the immediacy of thought, practically blinding the reader. Beckett uses logic to destroy logic, stranding the reader without a compass. With The Book of Questions, Jabès engages in mysticism that is at once both so mundane and so impenetrable that the reader has the impression of wandering through an Escher landscape, where dimensions shift and realign without warning, multiple times on every page.

This mysticism is grounded in Semitism, though from my limited understanding, it is not necessarily Kabbalistic. But it is expansive, finally enveloping the gentile world, too. Jabès frames the endless heartbreak of the Hebrew people with real poetry: “The Jews have taken shelter behind the stones thrown at them.” “The Israelite has his eyes turned toward Jerusalem in the way the grown child looks at his mother’s womb: the cause of his misfortunes.” The ancient/modern experience of the Jewish people becomes the ancient/modern experience of the world that engendered the Jews, trampled them, and now pulses with their culture so thoroughly, so unknowingly, the fabric cannot be unwoven.

One is left with the impression of a culture that has grown weary even of its own weariness, and is as surprised by its own endurance as by its brilliance. Western civilization and Jewish culture entered into a symbiotic relationship that reached a new level of dysfunction in the twentieth century, but the message of The Book of Questions is that the concentration camp experiences of Sarah and Yukel – the collective scream that is the Holocaust – is, like everything else, a question whose answer is a Möbius loop of life and death, good and evil, body and spirit, ephemeral and ineluctable.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably the most important book I've read so far this year. It's sublime and I hope to write a proper review of it someday. Jabès redefined what poetry could be and how it can be presented. There is so much in here to reflect on-- even taking three months to read it felt like I was rushing. An infinitely expanding parade of quotable rabbis, the story of Sarah and Yukel, ruminations on exile, on ambivalence toward God, on words, on the power of the Book.

As long as we are not chased from our words we have nothing to fear. As long as our utterances keep their sound we have a voice. As long as our words keep their sense we have a soul.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am the breath of my books like wind engulfed by the sea. Every wave a suspension of foam and water; any color, the one the sky takes. But raising the waves, inventing their forms and fringes, the wind too is reborn and runs with them through the ocean until exhausted. Its power comes from elsewhere, but its will is its own.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say of this wound in the book, of the book?
Fiction? Only as all we all could be called so.
What is this work that moves at the margins of definition, the margins of the book? It is a wound, a desert, of the darkness of the day and the bright light of the night.
Do not seek to fix it, pin it down. Follow it, in and out of the book. Experience it, and yourself, in and as this wound.

[andorfan]

Reading Jabès' Le livre des questions (The Book of Questions) was an enveloping experience. The words and phrases on the page appear resolute and unwavering, to the point where as a reader one feels drawn in by their gravity; much like how smaller astral objects get pulled into the orbits of larger objects, planets, etc. Yet the language and style itself isn't exactly spare (there's no apotheosis of the Hemingway or Bukowski style of clarity and zip here!). At moments, Jabès' poetic lines are almost cliché. But they are nonetheless undeniably beautiful - and intense. All the while, the experience as such of reading Jabès' text (poem? novel? play? aphorisms?) is dogged by interruption. This is what Blanchot has to say about it:

“In the totality of fragments, thoughts, dialogues, invocations, narrative movements, and scattered words that make up the detour of a single poem, I find the powers of interruption at work, so that the writing, and what is proposed to writing (the uninterrupted murmur, what does not stop), must be accomplished in the act of interrupting itself.”

Who knows what Blanchot means precisely by "what is proposed to writing...must be accomplished in the act of interrupting itself" but the phrase is certainly provoking. Jabès' The Book of Questions employs the technique where the voices of a multiplicative and multiplying number of imaginary rabbis skirt in and around narratives passages centered on exile, separation, Jewishness, the tragic love story of Yukel and Sarah (torn apart by the Shoah). The inclusion of these rabbinical voices, whose voices occasionally emphasize clearly the nature of "questioning" Jabès seems so interested and invested in, also puts into question what we can consider a scared text. Rabbinical commentary is an age-old tradition in Torah study and even looking at a page of the Talmud, of the Mishnah and Gemara makes it clear that Jabès' text shares a similar stake in a kind of historical accretionism, an accumulation of commentaries (all signed by their respective rabbis, of course) that point to a concrete history.
But on this point, perhaps the most compelling aspect of the work, Jabès seems to both submit and subvert this dependence on historicity & faith. Derrida has a good essay that treats, among other things, this paradox (collected in Writing and Difference). To bring this paradox to its highest register, Jabès' God is a God who questions himself. The sacred text is nothing without its commentary - or put in another way, the book is nothing without other books (books that are not coincident with itself). Ultimately this leads to the question of what relation exists between the book and life. At what point can we adjudicate what we think of as "autobiographical" in the book with the measure of the cold, hard facts of reality and history? Does the book, in fact, contain in itself a world, much as how Mallarmé once dreamed of a grand Book that would contain everything in its pages? I should stop myself here before the questions really become endless. I'll end with a passage from Jabès' Book of Questions - a speech from Yukel Serafi, both character and poet, on the nature of writing"

"I, Serafi, the absent, am born to write books.

(I am absent because I am the teller. Only the tale is real.)

I have traveled around the world of absence.
I have spoken to my absent-minded fellow men in their language (which is their prey, and of which they are prey,
to my fellow men who have not always considered me their fellow man.
I have borne the weight of their prey.
I have erased, in my books, the borderline of life and death.
I have taken my leave."

[Caleb Horowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Brian Brogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An original, seems like classic, in search for, and informed by the divine through language, the word, in its complexities, the paradoxical shadow and light, seeking of the self and humanity in this matrix.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very simply, I am always reading this book. Here's why: It eludes, informs, and gives hope.

[NhaThuyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

why do i feel that i am getting in the mood to (re)read something? it's not for feelings of loneliness but for the loneliness is a great comfort to me? it's also like the feeling of falling in love but don't need to know exactly whom you are in love with or rather, you can feel that love is enough by itself, and you don't need to demand any response? no, it's a big lie. i am lying. but how i can tell the truth without lying?

"so truth is, in time, the absurd and fertile quest of lies, which we pay with tears and blood.", he said.

in a lightened moment, and with a deep inspiration, i know that i love and at the same time i know i have to learn how to love the loves. it's so challenging to love someone(s) as if love is the only thing i can but also i know that love is impossible. i love you and it's impossible to love.

"our ties to beings and things are so fragile they often break without us noticing", it's not He who said in the book but the silent passion for life said to me.

why do i feel that i am getting in the mood to (re)read something? it's time i know that the books are leaving me, the loves are leaving me and i have to learn how to just see them leaving me even without breathing for being afraid of that breath will make them/the loves/my being trembled.

but maybe more simply, i have to let them leave me for my own freedom.

and one of the most helpful thing i get from The Book OF QUESTION is, as many other books i love, i can use it to tell fortune.

and also it's a book not only for man of questions but for anyone who is hungry for questions.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"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."

[David Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life: changed, 6/24/08

[Michal Schwartz · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetic essence of Jewish thought and history; a whole universe in a tear...

[Jonathan Koven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the most important things I’ve ever read. Every sentence is sublime. If you are Jewish, read this; if you are a writer, read this; and if you are a Jewish writer like myself, then this is required reading for your soul.

An undefinable poetic commentary on creativity and art, God’s existence/absence, exile and Jewish identity, the concept of a (compromised) Promised Land, language and silence, the Holocaust and justice. Truly special read from the 70’s that, in creating its own kind of philosophical scripture, demands a counterpoint to Zionism. Jabès was a proud Egyptian Jew, expelled with other Jews during the Suez Crisis, who witnessed the Holocaust and the creation of modern Israel, who lived among Jews and Arabs alike, and his life’s work consisted of unpacking Jewish grief, history, and a hopeful path forward that excludes no one.

[Kai]

"We walk barefoot along the pages of your book, Yukel, on rocks which overhang the sea. Your story is that of the waves, which break at our ankles, and, sometimes whip our faces. One and the same story, one and the same wave. Now full of strength, now so weak it seems wounded.

And we watch it, passively, because it asks nothing of us, but carries us beyond the shore, where the sun rises and sets, as if dark and light joined together for us."

[osterplana · Rating 5 out of 5]

je suis au bout de ma vie, si seulement cinq étoiles n’était pas un understatement grossier

[Henri · Rating 4 out of 5]

很厚重的一本书。
我的灵魂寄居在每本书的字里行间。

[Marquise Soleil · Rating 5 out of 5]

C niche as fuck faut le vouloir pour le lire et le trouver MAIS c un ouvrage majeur en ce qui concerne la poésie

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's always something interesting about Deconstructive post-modern literature, particularly how it reveals the disjointed realities of the contemporary day. This text, which seems to itself suffer from the horrors of the 20th Century (particularly, the Holocaust), replicates what Joyce did slightly better in creating a prose/poem series in seemingly random quotes from Rabbis and non-linear distracted prose snippets.

There's a lot of great one-liners throughout and one really gets the lost and persecuted tone of the text, but I found the incomprehensibility of the majority of this off-putting. I am wary to say it, but perhaps I simply cannot grasp much of the genius that is going on here; perhaps it is my lacking knowledge of Judaism and Kabbalistic mythology, or perhaps I'm just dense with this one.

At any rate, at times I was appreciating what I was reading and at others I may have read over lines while absorbing nothing. Like God. Like how I, myself, am here, in the words.

Reb Jeff says, "The seed that is the sky opens the ground where Yukel got confused by the water which ripples, which proves God. Which is nothing."

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal and rather unclassifiable book. The Book of Questions merges quotations, prose, poetry, and aphorism into one labyrinthine masterpiece. I seek out writing that tries to do something new with style, tries to expand the bounds of expression and Jabes succeeds to a rare degree here. While there's certainly a logic to the book's flow, there isn't any plot to speak of and the topic is roughly "how can one write anything after the Holocaust." The book is very Jewish and very much concerned with writing, God, and lofty concepts. While I'm so entirely sick of writing about writing (seriously writers, no one else cares...can we get back to the real world), Jabes language is so enigmatic and evocative that this book could be about anything and it would still be amazing. Highly recommend to people who like prose poetry and can stand wandering around lost in a forest of phrases.

[Myhte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have I given drink, I who know only thirst, I, absent from myself, I, Yukel Serafi, whose life and story are summed up in a few sentences? I share the fate of the worn-out beast in its self-willed night. Let my works be my three torches and let my heart, which no longer beats in unison with my hereos, grow sober like theirs and freeze near the rendered page. Man does not exist, God does not exist. The world alone exists through God and man in the open book.

[javor · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird and fabulous. A meditation on language and its meaning for the Jewish people.

“Words stick to my flesh as to blotting paper. The world is illegible on the skin.”

[Jac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Jabes, my hero. This book immediately made it into the top ten, even before I've finished the second volume. It is one of the most challenging, comforting, exciting books I have ever read.

[stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

brilliant.

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

wings shiver with some kind of pain. but few books go this far down into ourselves.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

dear god