Can You Ever Really Read Proust? ; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, Trans Jeffrey Mehlman (Granta, Pounds 12)
Evening Standard - London › December 10, 2007
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Summary
HAVE I read this book? Sort of. Pierre Bayard is a Professor of French Literature in Paris and a Lacanian analyst who has written many paradoxical works of criticism, about subjects such as digression in Proust, the use of literature in psychoanalysis, the dialogue of the deaf that critics have conducted about Hamlet, and working out Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? He likes to promote "le delire d'interpretation", the idea that there can never be any end to the different readings of any book.
Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus? was published at the start of the year in France and has been a huge success there. Now it's been translated without the question mark.See the full content of this document
Extract
Can You Ever Really Read Proust? ; How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard, Trans Jeffrey Mehlman (Granta, Pounds 12)
It's a pert little volume in three parts.
In the first, he observes uncontroversially that our knowledge of books is always partial and tenuous, even when it is not completely hearsay. In the second, he describes some exemplary "literary confrontations" in which...See the full content of this document
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