Gianmarco Pinciroli, “The maze of interrogation”. Considerations upon From the desert to the book by Edmond Jabès

Jabès, Franco-Egyptian poet, builds his own project around a way of thinking and writing which is presented as an incessant demand on the part of his countless imaginary rabbis. In fact the protagonists of his non-stories and of his non-poems are mostly imaginary rabbis who endlessly comment on the infinity of the question regarding very different issues, yet all converging, even when they seem to be asseverative, in tone and register in the forms of questioning. He never stopped to feel an exile, on behalf of all the others living instead in a detailed place. The real problem to solve is then, for the exile, the final and calming acknowledgment of such condition, after a long and painful inner path: and his literary writing is a living testimony of such a path.

Published on: The Wretched of the earth? N. 24 New Series – Year XII 2016