Jalal Toufic is an amazing writer. He documents
the moves of consciousness in a way that leads the reader ever
deeper, from impasse to illusion to new impasse—turning
the trap of “what can’t be named” into a true
paradise. Both of his books [Distracted and (Vampires)]
knocked me out; totally original, totally fascinating.
Richard Foreman, Artistic Director of the Ontological-Hysteric
Theater, and a MacArthur Fellow Jalal
Toufic is one of the best writers in America today. Although
fluent in French and Arabic, he has chosen English as his
language of expression and his first 2 books, Distracted
and (Vampires), are some of the best writing of the
past 20 years.
John Zorn, Film Works IV
This year has already seen the publication
of Toufic’s Undying Love, or Love Dies (Post
Apollo), a book that among other things unforgettably re-writes
various versions of the Orpheus myth, as well as the release
of a “revised and expanded” version of (Vampires):
An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (also from Post
Apollo), first published in 1993, and written for “mortals
to death.” (Vampires) is a sort of sequel to
Toufic’s 1991 debut Distracted, explicitly
written for the living and here becoming what Toufic calls
an “untimely collaboration” with the author of
the original edition and of (Vampires) too. As one
proceeds through the book [Distracted]’s aphoristic
prose paragraphs, very different eras and states of being
seem to flow along and past one another and through the speaker’s
utterly unique sensibility. The book is thus not so much about
what happens when Raymond Roussel repeats a sentence but changes
billard (pool table) to pillard (plunderer), or about theories
of the effects of “surpassing disaster” on cultures
(including Jewish and Shi‘ite) and literatures, or about
reactions to how love, drunkenness and distraction are rendered
by (and in) the deeply interconnected media of memory, film
and language. Rather, the book records a kind of double or
even multiple experience of these things.... There is nothing
else in literature like it.
Publishers Weekly, November 2003
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