My next book, La Réticence (1991), was written entirely in response to Camera. Critics had talked a lot about how light and virtuoso Camera was; I wanted to move away from such virtuosity, I wanted to break it apart. La Réticence is a difficult, demanding, tough book, it’s harsh and sometimes unpolished. I wrote this book trying to keep in mind a secret guideline, a Beckettian one, the one that says: “badly seen, badly expressed,” and I tried to fail to see things and to fail to say them (and I succeeded in doing so, I must say, if the reaction of the media and readers is any indication).

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, interview, originally published in the 2nd edition of Caméra, Editions de Minuit, now translated at the Dalkey Archive (ht woods lot)

parallel lines

Is this a crypto-reactionary step backwards towards humanism, sentimentalism, positivism and the whole gamut of bad isms that the vanguard 20th-century novel expended so much effort overcoming – and, moreover, a step backwards enabled by some of that vanguard’s own techniques? It’s hard to say.

Tom McCarthy on Toussaint in the LRB. (If all reviews were like this, reports that print journalism is moribund would be grossly exaggerated.)