Testimony

Impressions about the Book of Boz, by Denise Lachaud

Friday, September 1st, 2006

By Denise Lachaud, psychoanalyst :

- The search for the rightest word, the most accurate, from the quietest to the strongest.
- The air is vibrating with a strange light, between glittering and dark flames.
- Blood, death, Devil, hell, etc. are covered with writing or, more precisely, with the ink of writing.
- This book shows a kind of torrid beauty, striped with scars, a pier to hope, a cemetery of burned dreams.
- The author is working hardt to imagine the litterature to which he offers a reprieve.
- This book can’t lack readers.
- Laughs, fears, tears, angers are always fecund
- The narrator can embody all his characters, real or virtual, human and mineral, vegetal or animal.
- This string of short stories, going from story to story, without being history, would be one of the most beautiful ones, if it was only the fruit of imagination. But the writer knows you can’t escape history’s claws; they eat you away but can also sharpen your pen. More, the writer sculpts space where reality is apparent until the style devices.
- It’s an off-screen account. An account trying to probe wounds.
- The writer can make the difference between a litterary essay and a scathing attack thrown away.
- Powerful writing that doesn’t exclude elegance in service of rage.
- An insoluble puzzle and it’s right. A puzzle composed of this hero’s song key whose behaviour is painted with gentle strokes.
- As an erudite expert, he reworks myths. The work is monumental.
- The spirituality or the death ; anyway, only spirituality could one day deliver men from their sad condition.
- Dramatic action, in the Greek meaning, for better or for worse.
- The writer, sparkling with mischief, knows human soul’s fragility better than anyone.
- The work invits us, like the mermaids’ song, and we enter it with delight.
- The irony is sometimes scathing but never cynical.
- An account ? Better : a string of characters and events. We meet…
- The virtuosic writer creates an hurly-burly from the world, then dares to shove history.
- With this or these phantasmagorias, he presents us History as very close of the people’s life.
- The cut up movement of the accounts subverts the genre of this monumental work, animated with a certain logic, presented in a true litterary whirlpool, with the disconcerting style of weaved legends.
- Here, there is no end to History. The experience is everyday where surprise comes stunningly. Another way of questioning the reader and the interlocutor.
- An intimate book going universal, gliding from a world to another.
- This work’s life comes within the long term; the book is there and we can take it whenever we want. This way, it becomes revolutionary.
- A labyrinth of deep considerations, social, political, religious, mystical, philosophical, flirting with metaphysics. Fine art.
- It’s life, with its joys and blues, hopes, spleens and death.
- The writer is tirelessly probing mankind’s open wounds, which can be, as shown by Stoics, as many open doors on hope.
- He connects Antiquity (story, heroes, time, events, …) to authenticity; a very modern authenticity.
- His strength lies in the research and analysis of the facts and discourses, which he dismantles, searching for truth in avoiding to be lost causes’ lawyer.
- A rendez-vous experts shouldn’t miss, on no account; for these words are to litterature what dreams are to life : some essential narrow escapes and aspirations. With them, we dive in the deepest of existence, where the quiet laught and the stealth tear are born.
- We travel through these words which, unider his pen, get their golden glow back.
- His worlds arise, meet, fight, die in a rythmed topology which provokes images and catch gazes.
- An extraordinary care for details caused by an exaggerated sensibility.
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My thoughts about the Book of Boz by Sandrine Rochez

Friday, September 1st, 2006

If we intend to compare and confront the Book of Boz to monuments of literature, three masterworks can be invoked right away. (Many others could probably be examined, from Goethe to Nietzsche or Kafka, through Nerval and even Proust…, but choices have to be made).

Here are these three elected works, in my opinion, seemingly responding to the complexity of the Book of Boz :

The Divine Comedy (1314-1320) by Dante (1265-1321), Don Quixote (1605-1615) by Cervantes (1547-1616) and finally, more recenty and maybe less known too, Albert Cohen’s (1895-1981) fiction work, which builds up in its whole, like Julien Friedler’s, an one and only always rewritten book, indeed even a cycle, formed by Solal (1930), Mangeclous (1938), Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valeureux (1969). (For the record, Les Valeureux was a part of Belle du Seigneur; the publisher Gallimard arbitrarily choosed to separate them, duplicating the author’s dilemna, quartered between the goy world and his dear tribe’s one, in the intend of reducing the already substantial amount of pages of Belle du Seigneur).

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