Marcel Benabou is quick to acknowledge that his own difficulty in writing has plenty of company. Words stick and syntax is stubborn, meaning slips and synonyms cluster. A blank page taunts and a full one accuses. Benabou knows the heroic joy of depriving critics of victims, the kindness of sparing publishers decisions, and the public charity of leaving more room in bookstore displays. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books (Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres) provides both a respectful litany of writers' fears and a dismissal of the alibis offered to excuse them. The author (or not)...

In one of the most thought-provoking and wry books by one of the most intriguing contemporary writers in French literature, readers become party to the dilemma of "challenging" literature in a singularly involving and amusing fashion. Opening a book that has mysteriously appeared amid the clutter of his desk, the narrator finds himself exhorted not to read further, to throw the book away Instead (but of course) he tries different strategies for approaching the book, none of which work. The narrator's tempestuous, increasingly obsessive relationship with the book he is determined to read,...

As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel Benabou s book is at once a memoir and a novel, a confession and a reflection on the prerogatives and imperatives of writing one s story. At its center, forever alluring and elusive, is the beautiful and ethereal Tamara, the exact incarnation of our narrator s most enduring fantasy a femme fatale for the lover of form. Who precisely our narrator is, is less certain: The young Manuel, who leaves his home in Morocco to study in Paris, only to encounter the enticing Tamara? Or the...