Death Sentence

Rating:
Summary: Staring Death in the Eye
Review: A short, harrowing work interested neither in description, character development, nor cleverness but rather in staring death in the eye. If you like Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, or even Raymond Carver you doubtless may detest this abstract gift of a conflicted consciousness of a taciturn man in love with a sickly, dying young woman during troubled times. Perhaps the supreme study of the impossibility of fidelity, let alone true love, in a world where death hangs in the air as the possibility of total absence or, more frighteningly, as the cipher of a total presence condemned to repeat its secret to deaf ears.

Rating:
Summary: Awesome.
Review: Death Sentence is awesome. There are many themes in this book, and if you pay any attention, and that keeps the book interesting. It is alternatingly bleak, hilarious, and sometimes bleakly hilarious.
The funniest line might be, "What do I care about that honor, or even that friend, or even his unhappiness? My own is immense, and next to it other people mean nothing." Or perhaps the line that the narrator throws in about sleeping in open graves may strike your fancy. If you do not find these bleakly funny, perhaps you are not morbid enough to read this book.
Several questions which may keep you up at night are, "Who is the narrator? What is Blanchot saying about French, or other, Cultures? What is the significance of casts? Why does everyone live in hotel rooms? How does Blanchot deal with the concept of death?

Rating:
Summary: Awesome.
Review: Death Sentence is awesome. There are many themes in this book, and if you pay any attention, and that keeps the book interesting. It is alternatingly bleak, hilarious, and sometimes bleakly hilarious.
The funniest line might be, "What do I care about that honor, or even that friend, or even his unhappiness? My own is immense, and next to it other people mean nothing." Or perhaps the line that the narrator throws in about sleeping in open graves may strike your fancy. If you do not find these bleakly funny, perhaps you are not morbid enough to read this book.
Several questions which may keep you up at night are, "Who is the narrator? What is Blanchot saying about French, or other, Cultures? What is the significance of casts? Why does everyone live in hotel rooms? How does Blanchot deal with the concept of death?

Rating:
Summary: death sentence is worse than a death sentence
Review: Foucault praised Blanchot on his writing of this book, expressed his admiration for Blanchot's style. But... it is Blanchot's style that makes the book absolutely unbearable. Focault thinks that Blanchot's absence of a plot is the plot itself. I think that there is a certain amount of faith in this believe; faith in the assumption that the non-plot is conscious, that it is deliberate. I don't, I can't, believe that this is true and if it is, I don't think it's that ingeneous. Books without plots are just long poems and even long poems (take Dante's Inferno) have some type of plot. Blanchot non-plot style of writing isn't particularily interesting, which might be different if Blachot could find a better subject to write about. The book rambles on, with the main charter being fickle, but since there is no plot, there is no way to determine exactly what he is being fickle on. The book, which is short, only one hundred pages, drags on and for such a short novel that's a "bad" thing.

Rating:
Summary: Blanchot the artist...
Review: L'arret de mort (Death Sentence)is a beautifully crafted piece of literary art...and one which starkly draws the boundary line between what is perceived as 'The Art of the Novel' in France and its dumbed-down American counterpart. Blanchot (along with Bataille, Robbe-Grillet and countless others; certainly not all from France) is a writer who dares to ask what fiction is, dares to redefine the form, re-examine his new definitions...he dares to make his novels about ideas, not mere bedtime stories (or worse, Hollywood film-treatments). From the first sentence to the last this novel draws the reader into considerations of our mortality, of the haunting trajectory of our experience, and most daring of all, it questions the very nature of literary endeavor. Magnificent.

Rating:
Summary: AStonishing example of the 'recit' literary form
Review: This lost classic of French literature is thankfully back in print, translated by Paul Auster's first wife, the excellent detail-led writer Lydia Davis. Death Sentence recounts the horrific drawn out death of writer Colette Laure Peignot whose posthumously gathered writings are now available as The Collected Writings of Laure on City Lights. See also on Amazon. The prose here sticks like a dart in your memory. Its the stuff of ticking clocks and sleepless nights. Gripping yet troubling. A vital part of the Georges bataille-Laure story. Highly recommended both as a translation and as a compelling piece of prose.