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Dump This Book
While You Still Can !
by
Marcel Bénabou
general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author
| Title: | Dump This Book While You Still Can ! |
| Author: | Marcel Bénabou |
| Genre: | Novel |
| Written: | 1992 (Eng. 2001) |
| Length: | 189 pages |
| Original in: | French |
| Availability: | Dump This Book While You Still Can ! - US |
| Dump This Book While You Still Can ! - UK | |
| Dump This Book While You Still Can ! - Canada | |
| Jette ce livre avant qu'il soit trop tard - Canada | |
| Dump This Book While You Still Can ! - India | |
| Jette ce livre avant qu'il soit trop tard - France |
- French title: Jette ce livre avant qu'il soit trop tard
- Translated by Steven Rendall
- With an Introduction by Warren Motte
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Our Assessment:
B : fairly entertaining literary game
See our review for fuller assessment.
| Source | Rating | Date | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rev. of Contemp. Fiction | A+ | Spring/2002 | Chad W. Post |
From the Reviews:
- "Reminiscent of If on a winter's night a traveler, Bénabou's novel is extremely compelling, even though it constantly forces its readers to question their motives for reading. Steven Rendall's translation is superb, and Warren Motte's introduction is an enlightening look at one of France's top writers." - Chad W. Post, Review of Contemporary Fiction
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
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The complete review's Review:
Dump This Book While You Still Can ! is a clever, catchy title.
Implicit in the title-admonition is the warning that there will come a point when you will no longer be able to dispose of the text, that there is something so captivating about the book that, before you know it, it will have you completely in its clutches.
It's a high bar to set for a book -- and one wonders whether most bookstore shoppers don't take the title too literally.
The book itself is also quite clever, as one might expect from Oulipo-member Bénabou.
It is written in the first person, and focusses largely on the difficulties the narrator has with a text -- a book that begins with the admonition to "dump this book" before it is too late.
Dump This Book While You Still Can ! is both a paean to the act of reading, and an acknowledgement of the inherent frustrations of the act.
The book the narrator is trying to read is a confounding text.
A few sections are reproduced, but by and large the narrator merely describes what he encounters as he tries to make his way through it.
It offers, as the best of books do, everything -- including a variety of Oulipian devices (S+7 and many others -- the Oulipo Compendium (see our review) makes a welcome companion volume to the novel).
It engages and warns the reader: "like me, you may get lost in it" the voice from within the book says -- but, for the narrator, this is as much a temptation as a caution.
Dump This Book While You Still Can ! is presented in symphonic form: Overture, four movements, and Coda.
Bénabou offers a wild literary ride on the way.
The book is full of allusions, overt and subtle.
A Flaubert and Balzac-like figure (conflated into Flauzac) figures prominently.
In the narrator's dreams even letters come alive, and he finds himself becoming one "among the others" (unfortunately he does not say which one).
Throughout, books (especially the one he is trying to read) seem literally alive.
The narrator does not have an easy time of it: "The text, in its stubbornness, rejected my approaches, and I found this resistance taunting."
There is a love interest in the book -- Sophie -- but the narrator's true obsession is the text.
Bénabou offers ingenious variations on the reading-theme: it is a fairly single-minded literary text, but done with a great deal of humour and cleverness.
Steven Rendall's translation seems to capture much of the playful character of the original.
Many of the word-games and some of the allusions are, inevitably, lost -- beginning, as Rendall notes, with the first word of the French title (jette (throw away), which "is read homonymically as je tais (I leave unsaid)").
Some of his choices are perhaps questionable -- changing the name of a character from 'Simon' to Sigmund' "in order to make the allusion to Freud clearer" -- but the playful, clever character of the text does come across quite well.
More than anything, Dump This Book While You Still Can ! evinces a belief in the power of literature.
It does so remarkably well, and often very entertainingly.
Dump This Book While You Still Can ! is a fun tug-of-war between text, reader, and author.
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Dump This Book While You Still Can !:
- University of Nebraska publicity page
- Schreiben als Rezeption, Lesen als Produktion by Wolfgang Orlich (German)
- Reading Marcel Bénabou by Warren Motte
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Marcel Bénabou is a member of the OuLiPo and has written several books.
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© 2002-2021 the complete review
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