The Social Night: On Denis Belloc
It’s that which constrains him, honest man and writer, to gathering a kind of manna at a border from which almost nothing can be seen: that which flocculates when we write “tightening the nuts and bolts”, as he said, or, to quote Duras, “at the words’ crest”; there, where the black, horned body of what one has to write, that which no one can ever truly read, lurks. But whose business is that, after all? What counts is that you have danced with the moths, and are finally able to fall silent.
By Patick Autréaux (translated by Tobias Ryan).
The Threshold and the Ledger
Malina resembles Ulysses in another, crucial respect. Both novels contain autofiction about a writer poised on the threshold of producing a masterpiece. In this way McCarthy’s essay itself becomes a work, in and of itself, about the possibility of producing a great literary work and, in turn, about the premise for and possibility of all literature.
Peter Carty reviews Tom McCarthy‘s The Threshold and the Ledger.