Once I imagined a novel in which everything seen throughout the day by a single person is reported in detail. I was a teenager in my first job and began by using company paper to describe the scrub on the slopes beside a motorway as seen from a car. I never got any further. No doubt the idea was prompted by a chance encounter late one night with Remembrance of Things Past and a lasting intrigue with its elaborate and apparently excessive descriptions combined with an apparent lack of a story. I think of it now after reading Anna Arno's biography of Paul Celan in an English translation by Soren Gauger, half-wishing that I hadn't. Not that I have any criticism of it as a biography. At over 400 pages it may well be as comprehensive as the form allows, and, if you need a comprehensive review, the LA Review of Books has one. My wish is due not to the tendency of literary biographies to conflate life and work – an inevitability and precisely why we pick up such books – but because its limits are not limited enough and its excesses not excessive enough. What would a literally comprehensive biography look like? Following my idea for a novel, I have imagined a biography of a writer that describes everything in and around their life outside of writing: what they did each day, the rooms in which they lived, the clothes they wore, the food and drink they consumed, how they slept; absolutely up close, absolutely unremarkable. I've read biographies of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille in which nothing of such detail is mentioned, focusing almost entirely on their public life and writings. If biographies were more like what I imagined, we might then sense the person and thereby the space between the writer and the work (Blanchot called it "the essential solitude"). Naturally, this would be impossible for a biographer, and near impossible for the subject. Somebody did try it, however. For 24 years, Robert Shields wrote a diary describing what he did in every minute of every day. The hair-raising sample pages from the diary reveal how life and work cancel each other out, becoming complementary voids.  Of course, Anna Arno's biography of Celan doesn't go this far. She sets the scene with a novelistic portrait of his hometown of Chernivtsi and how Celan spent his youth there, followed by the war, the murder of his parents, and then his exile, first in Vienna and finally in Paris. We read about his passionate Judaism, his struggles to make a living, his friendships, his marriage, the loss of a son at birth, his devotion to his second son Eric, his obsessive need for his wife's fidelity while he conducted numerous affairs, his awkward meeting with Heidegger despite his demand that others steer clear of ex-Nazis, the terrible effects of the "Goll Affair" and subsequent psychosis, hospitalisation and suicide, with the poetry, translations, prose and correspondence providing a nested commentary by Celan himself. In fact, there's no doubt this is a serious and valuable study of the poet's life and work, and yet, at the same time, the blend proper to literary biography inevitably tends towards caricature, often prompting the reader to judge its subject's hypocrisy. The constraint on detail thereby narrows the necessary space and the in-line quotations of poetry are read as a code confirming the narrative portrait. Apart from silence then, is there an alternative?  Many years ago I read an anecdote from a friend of Kafka's, probably Gustav Janouch, who said how, on calling at his home on yet another day when Kafka was late for their meeting, he saw Kafka bounding down the stairs, his knees kicking high as he descended. For all the wealth of Stach's biography, this felt like the closest to what it was like to be in the presence of the man himself, which, though trivial and saying nothing about his work – unless one can perhaps make an argument for its untimely quality – provides more in a single image than any 400-page narrative (similar to "The onlookers go rigid when the train goes past", the first line of Kafka's diaries). Jean Daive's Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop and published by a small press 1 rather than a major one like Belknap, offers similar images from Celan's life.  A recollection: near Avenue Emile-Zola, Paul Celan looks for a grocery store. He buys a lightbulb that he puts in a huge netbag. Carrying the netted lightbulb he moves on in a lordly way. And the net hangs heavy.  And:  Recollection: Paul coming back from London. "I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room." And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, "Sometimes God, sometimes nothing."  Each of these, it seems to me, with their mix of banality, elegance, poignancy and oddity, is enough. If the poems quoted in the biography open onto meaning via the life, these anecdotes, as with Celan's poetry, present as the open itself. My imagined novel did not progress because the image of the scrub, between sky and tarmac, was also enough. It remains, sometimes everything, sometimes nothing. The surprise of being? A primal scene, again? Note  1: Burning Deck originally, but no longer available in the photographed edition.

The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.1   It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. I've now read the third, by Peter Bush. The Oxford World's Classics paperbacks are affordable, easy to hold open and, while the typeface is small, it's not too small. Overall, this is the ideal edition for those planning to read Proust in English for the first time and for those wanting to read a translation more faithful to the original than Scott-Moncrieff's, bountiful as it is. The contents for each volume suggests another reason to recommend, coming as it does with extensive background information. Excluding Proust's titles, the table of contents looks like this: General Editors' Preface Translator's Note Introduction Note on the Text  Select Bibliography A Chronology of Marcel Proust Explanatory Notes.  Compare this to the Penguin Classics paperback from the 1980s in which I first read Proust: while The Guermantes Way is 100 pages longer because of the larger typeface, it also includes Cities of the Plain, making it a bulky 1,100 pages.2 Also, the table of contents lists (again, in addition to Proust's) only Notes, Addenda and Synopsis, with the notes filling three pages. The new edition has sixty-seven. The reader is directed to each note by an asterisk placed after a word. In a flurry of black snowflakes, there are often several to a page. If some provide detail of Proust's life to align the fiction to his biography, most explain the narrator's allusions, cultural references and the contemporary and historical events mentioned. This includes a veritable Who's Who of the fin de siècle French aristocracy, which is of course almost entirely unfamiliar to modern English readers.  In two previous posts on the first volumes new translation, I express dismay at the unfamiliarity of the details, which I assumed exposed the shallowness of my first reading.3 In the new translation, Marcel's visit to the barracks at Doncières, his grandmother's decline and death, Albertine's brief visit to his home, his attendance at the salons of Mme de Villeparisis and the Duchesse de Guermantes, and the surprising turn taken in his call on the Baron de Charlus at the very end, are each very clear and memorable, yet almost entirely new to me. And then there is the seismic presence of the Dreyfus Affair splitting high society into two camps, which I do remember. But what did I know of it back then? Perhaps only visions of Steve McQueen in Papillon. Nearly forty years later then, it was a different experience, a kind of disappointment, in that it was mostly intellectual, if not lacking the usual pleasures of reading, including laughs. In discussing de Charlus' excessive grieving over his late wife, the Princesse de Parme notes that "we sometimes do for the dead what wouldn't have done for the living", with which Mme de Guermantes concurs: "For one thing...we go to their funerals, which we never do for the living!"  What this meant was that the breadth of space opened in my mind by Proust's long, luscious sentences as rendered, perhaps misleadingly, by Scott-Moncrieff, with, as Julia Kristeva puts it, their "odors, sounds, colors, shapes, tasty delicacies, and tactile pleasures", as well as arcane references proliferating across clause and sub-clause, in which one's thinking turns from a slog into a waltz, was not repeated.4 Had my young self been seduced then by the mere flourishes of an arch stylist? If I am appalled at myself for not being more attentive, for seeing the novel not only as a transcendent presence but as a guide to a life to come and the value of art, it is a recognition reflected in Marcel's own journey. I see that now. From a distance, he falls in love with the Duchesse de Guermantes solely on account of her family name only to be disillusioned upon getting to know her and the world she inhabits. We become enchanted with a certain work like In Search of Lost Time and wish to pursue it beyond the covers, perhaps by reading biographies and literary studies, by reading philosophers who influenced its ideas and the novelists inspired by its example or, if that isn't enough, by visiting the writer's house if they're dead or going to hear them talk at a literary festival if they're the living dead.  What The Guermantes Way makes plain is that much of this research is unsatisfying, a dissatisfaction blurred like the sun through oceanic depths of information, and is also why many common readers will struggle with this part of the novel: there are hundreds of pages full of the twitterings of dinner parties, part of what Gilles Deleuze called the narrator's "apprenticeship to signs".5 According to him, there are four signs: worldly signs, the signs of love, sensuous signs, and the signs of art. The Guermantes Way offers a prolonged exposure to the first. Worldly signs constitute the language of an in-crowd. Maintaining one's place within it depends on making the right signs. Nothing funny is said at the Verdurins', and Mme Verdurin does not laugh; but Cottard makes a sign that he is saying something funny, Mme Verdurin makes a sign that she is laughing, and her sign is so perfectly emitted that M. Verdurin, not to be outdone, seeks in his turn for an appropriate mimicry. Deleuze is referring to another salon here but the signs apply across high society. While these signs are empty, their emptiness nevertheless "confers upon them a ritual perfection" in which everything is clear and known.  The signs of love, by contrast, confers a ritual of anxiety. The loved one "expresses a possible world unknown to us", one that we wish to enter and study with the intensity of a codebreaker. Nothing about the loved one is clear and knowledge is sought with trepidation. We seek facts as a painkiller only for it to turn into a knife under the ribcage, as we remain excluded, even, and especially, when the loved one gives us signs of preference. Thus, "the means we count on to preserve us from jealousy are the very means that develop that jealousy". We see this in serial form across the novel, from Swann's love for Odette, St Loup's for Rachel, and Marcel's for Gilberte and Albertine. The sensuous signs are those that have made In Search of Lost Time famous: the petite madeleine, the loose paving stone, etc. presenting an ecstatic truth without intellectual agency. Beckett guesses there are 12 or 13. Involuntary memory is explosive, 'an immediate, total and delicious deflagration.' It restores, not mere the past object, but the Lazarus that it charmed or tortured, not merely Lazarus and the object, but more because less, more because it abstracts the useful, the opportune, the accidental, because in its flame it has consumed Habit and all its works, and in its brightness revealed what mock reality of experience never can and never will reveal–the real.6 As with the signs of love, they demand interpretation and the signs of art constitute the 'Search' of Proust's title. The goal is to recover time wasted at dinner parties and time lost in love. Deleuze notes that the first three types of signs depend on material conditions while art is immaterial. In this way it is not subordinated to the experience of an individual and as such enables us to recognise its place in the plurality of experience.  If Deleuze's analysis helps us to understand why it is especially challenging to maintain attention throughout The Guermantes Way, it may also help us to appreciate the difference between novels in general and the essential novel. That is, by applying Deleuze's signs to the culture of reading and writing about novels. We can see the critical apparatus given in the Oxford World's Classics edition as the worldly signs of reading novels. They enable us to place the reading experience in the context of literary history, the macro history of the author's time and the micro history of the author's life. They offer knowledge we can use to accommodate our response to the work and express it in public. We can see the overall series as a worldly sign: the edition presents world's classics and everything that phrase implies, acting like the bright pastel colours of supermarket fiction or the gothic filigree of YA Fantasy. Genre fiction makes a sign of pleasure and the reader makes a sign of enjoyment. Both are empty. This is why booklovers claim with an addict's panicked fervour that they devour books. We can also see the worldly signs in the framing of novels in The Guardian newspaper's book coverage. What then are the signs of love? The stack above of Proust studies and Proust's writings in addition to the novel itself indicate my attempts to interpret the signs given by a reading of Albertine Asleep I heard in 1978 and the beloved beaten-up secondhand copy of volume one of Remembrance of Thing Past bought in 1987 for £3:10 (the minutae of infatuation). The means to travel closer to the work may be the very means of increasing distance. A magnificent distance nonetheless.  The sensuous signs of reading are the most difficult to describe. It should consitute the focus of critical response. Gabriel Josipovici spoke of what Proust's novel does that other forms cannot. I have never wanted to write poetry. So there must be things fiction can do that poetry can't.....This has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily.  This is close to my own experience of the essential novel. On a summer's day browsing bookshelves, anxious and passing time before a meeting, I picked up Peter Handke's Across and, reading the first line, I felt the dense air evaporate. Time disappeared, replaced in miraculous moment by time's essence. It's happened since in different ways and in different novels by different authors. One cannot seek them. They cannot be guaranteed. What Proust's example shows us is that we must create our own work, equivalent to In Search of Lost Time however feeble our resources in comparison to his. Weakness in this case should be considered the greatest strength.    Notes 1: from The Guermantes Way.  2. The title is Scott-Moncrieff's bowdlerised version of Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust's original title is restored in the Oxford World's Classics edition translated by Helen Constantine, published in June 2026. 3.  The Swann Way and In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom respectively.   4. In Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by Ross Guberman.  5. In Proust & Signs, translated by Richard Howard.  6. In Proust by Samuel Beckett.

Perhaps all novels seek to converge on a single point.  The thought occurred to me as I read Vila-Matas' Montevideo, translated by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. A random thought, apparently, but also the kind of thought provoked by the passion of observation, anecdote and speculation in Vila-Matas' novels, each of which, however distinct, may be said to ask the question in the epigram to Montano's Malady: "What will we do to disappear?". If the single point is disappearance, from what do we disappear?  The passion of observation, anecdote and speculation perhaps. If the writer and reader wishes to disappear from writing, to be free from the guile of games and the interval of abstraction, finally to be present to the world as it is, an answer is to give a firm "No!" to writing, as done by those featured in Bartleby & Co or, in a slight variation, to be forced into the world by writer's block. This is Montano's malady, a predicament similar to the literary publisher in Dublinesque who fears the disappearance of what has been his life's work. The alternative is to leave the world behind by disappearing into writing, which is what reading the epigram placed before the usual content of the novel promises and immediately threatens. Which kind of disappearance is it then? It's significant that the epigram is taken from L'Entretien infini, Maurice Blanchot's essay collection translated as The Infinite Conversation. As Susan Hanson explains in the foreword to her translation, 'Entretien' has a nuance the English lacks, as it can mean "a between that is rigorously held to". We're between question and possible answer. The gift of everyday language and genre fiction is to be excused the question as words and world disappear into one another.  Rigorously holding between is the comedy of Vila-Matas' novels and why regular readers become exasperated with what they see as "writing about writing", and especially because the comedy is not comedy as in Commedia in which one begins in Hell, passes through Purgatory and ends in Paradise. The novel is the by-product of disenchantment and as such maintains only the residue of the promise of another life. Recognition of the residue may be what defines the literary in literary fiction. The gift of genre fiction is to fulfil that promise, for a time.  A clone of Vila-Matas narrates Montevideo because the quest for disappearance is personal. He goes in search of it in chapters each named after a city: as a young man he travels to Paris with the romantic notion of becoming a writer only to write nothing and find himself instead disappearing into "the seedy side" of the capital, going to boozy parties and dealing in drugs. Rather than the novel disappearing into a titillating account of crime and debauchery, the reader is pointed to Lucy Sante's The Other Paris before carrying on writing about writing.  In the title chapter, the other form of disappearance is sought in a hotel room in the Uruguayan capital, the setting of The Sealed Door, a story by Julio Cortàzar that fascinates the clone. He books the same room  (no pun intended) to open the eponymous door, perhaps finally to enter the origin of literature. The Spanish book cover suggests what he finds. While it's a pity the Yale UP edition doesn't also use Hammershøi's painting, the unlovely digital adaptation reminds us of an artificiality holding disappearance at arm's length. We might ask at this point: why do we have novels like Montevideo? Shouldn't they provide more serious investigations into life in the world? Even the anxiety expressed is done in such an insouciant manner that nothing can be taken on face value. In contrast, we have seen in recent years a remarkable surplus of very serious novels full of "heartstopping beauty...sumptuous prose [and] philosophical depth" 1 invariably spanning several hundred pages and hailed as up there with the accepted greats of modernism, so calling books like Montevideo a novel appears to be not only a category error but an insult to the common reader.  To answer, we need to reflect on a question Kafka asked in his diary. If writing expansively on his unhappiness appears to him as "a merciful surplus of strength" when he is in the depth of suffering, "what kind of surplus is it?".2 There's a short story by Jean Paulhan collected in the translation above called Aytré who gets out of the habit, written in 1910 but published in 1943, which can be described only incidentally as a murder mystery. It begins with an adjutant in the French colonial army in Madagascar writing a private diary discussing a French woman, Raymonde, with whom he was having an affair and who has been stabbed to death. While he deals with the aftermath, his sergeant Aytré takes over writing the official log of their journey escorting 300 Senegalese women from one side of the island to the other, and the diary is interrupted to include the log. For a time Aytré notes down the simple details demanded by the form – the distance covered each day, the condition of the women, the cost of chickens, etc. – which makes for less interesting reading than the diary but, after a couple of weeks, he begins to digress by writing up his own opinions, noting down cultural differences, including a long passage detailing the seven modes of transport he has witnessed on the island. As the title says, Aytré is getting out of the habit of military life. The story then returns to the adjutant's diary and ends with his discovery that Aytré killed Raymonde in a fit of jealousy.  This is of course unremarkable and there's no apparent reason to disinter such an obscure story from a writer more or less unknown in English. So what is the point of all this?  In an essay on the story published the same year, Blanchot claims that Aytré is a man who has felt an emptiness in himself: "a defect, a lack of something decisive, whose absence becomes, little by little, unbearable". Perhaps he was driven to an extreme act because for him the unbearable feeling took the form of a woman. This makes sense and leaves us with the question of toxic masculinity, thereby helping the common reader to disappear from literature into the world of socio-political considerations. For many, this is the literary in literary fiction. Blanchot takes a different path by arguing that the digressions in the log also constitute an attempt to fill the emptiness with the excess of language. This has unforeseen consequences.  From this little story, it does not follow that literature must necessarily begin with crime or, failing that, with flight. But that it does imply a caving in, a kind of initial catastrophe, and the very emptiness that anxiety and care measure; yes, we can be tempted to believe that. But let us note that this catastrophe does not fall only on the world, the objects one handles, the things one sees; it, extends also to language[:] all the thick layering of words, the sedimentation of comfortable meanings that move off, detach themselves, become a slippery and dangerous slope. The threat spreads to anyone who allows himself to answer it. 3 After finding something decisive missing from his life, Aytré loses the habit of straightforward notation and tries to fill the absence with a thick layering of detail, only for the absence to reveal itself as part of writing too. Writing gets out of the habit of regular meaning.  for [Aytré], recourse to the most literary or beautiful language signifies only the irreparable loss of the only language that was certain for him, that in which it was enough for him to write, "We are doing twenty kilometers a day."  Blanchot points out that, following Mallarmé, every word consists of absence and, for this reason, questions whether Kafka is correct to think his extemporising on unhappiness with flourishes and ornamentations is in fact a surplus. The effect of being able to express unhappiness with as much eloquence as one can muster means that colloquial language, in which the words disappear into the world, is replaced by poetic language, which, as it does not allow for translation into other words, becomes paradoxically "a kind of poverty" because all other words cannot properly say the same thing. In effect it says nothing. Kafka's unhappiness is, in its finest expression, entirely separate from the experience, even to the one suffering it. Yes, we understand what 'unhappiness' means in general, but what does Kafka's unhappiness mean? This paradox, in which the exultation of self-expression and the gift of literature becomes "the first stirring of a fundamental deprivation", is, for Blanchot, the beginning of literature. The surplus of maximalist novels in recent years, rather than renewing modernism, can only evade the implications of the paradox, and evasion becomes the means of its critical reception; the longer the book, the better to forget. 4 The beginning may be the single point on which Vila-Matas' novels seek to converge. The need is sometimes unbearable, and there is never any end to Vila-Matas' novels.   Notes  1 From a tweet by Krapp's Last Vape.  2 From 19th September 1917. 3 From The Paradox of Aytré in The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell.  4 It cannot be a coincidence that in Kafka's The Judgment Georg Bendemann's revelation that his friend in Russia to whom he writes with a freedom founded on evasion is in fact his father, who has the final word.

My old and very good friend Mark Thwaite has taken over at the Left on the Shelf bookshop, so if you're at all interested in any of the subjects listed in the poster below, please consider subscribing to his newsletter, checking out the listings on Abebooks, and the offers on eBay. The shop also has Instagram and Facebook accounts. Given time, he may become the Jeff Bezos of the revolution.