Notebooks, 1956-1978

Danielle Collobert

Translated by Norma Cole

2003 • 84 pp. • $12.00
ISBN: 0-9723331-1-8

Dalkey Archive Press on reading Danielle Collobert

Esther Press review, August 2004

Rain Taxi Review of Books, Vol. 9 No. 2, Summer 2004 (#34)

In Danielle Collobert's Notebooks the urgency of her writing is accompanied by the weight of hindsight—that we know how it ends—and yet it is not stifled by morbidity. Instead, the intensity and integrity of her struggles rise to the surface. Collobert's questions—of presence in the world, of politics and intimacy—are constantly recovered from the blur of experience. Collobert moves towards and away in a feverish attempt to connect, stay connected—whether in her personal encounters, moments of activism or writing—and though she ultimately chooses death, there is enough life in her writing to carry on: "the hum of life all around..I open/ and I close."

"beyond everything she had discovered her own utter nakedness: that owned by nights of relentless attention to the other, or reflected in mirrors of all-night cafes where you can look, listen or simply wait, attending the blank page, from which the lassitude of daybreak will rescue you, overwhelm you."

—Uccio Esposito-Torrigiani, from the Postface

"She enunciates the words for desire and for loss of the other words with harrowing intensity... [and] explores the limits of the phenomenal body and of speech by the agency of a prose which defies category."

— Michael Palmer

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