“I think that what I blame books for, in general, is that they are not
free. One can see it in the writing: they are fabricated, organized, regulated:
one could say they conform. A function of the revision that the writer often
wants to impose on himself. At the moment, the writer become his own cop. By
being concerned with good form, in other words the most banal form, the
clearest and most inoffensive. There are still dead generations that produce
prim books. Even young people: charming books, without extension, without darkness.
Without silence. In other words, without a true author. Books for daytime, for
whiling away the hours, for traveling. But not books that become embedded in
one’s thoughts and toll the black mourning for all life, the common place of
every thought.
I don’t know what a book is. No one knows. But we know when there is
one. And when there’s nothing, one knows it the way one knows one has not yet
died.”
Marguerite Duras, Writing (translated
by Mark Polizzotti), páginas 23-24.
salud!.
