No brief comment can adequately describe this book; it is impossible
even to categorize it. But this is true of Nietzsche’s
writings, too, and it is with Nietzsche that I can most readily
compare Jalal Toufic. Like Nietzsche, Toufic is a writer of
philosophical aphorisms, manifestations of the intensest of
experiences under pressure of incomparable intelligence. But
Nietzsche was no miniaturist, and neither is Toufic. The pressure
that the thinking must withstand makes the writing remarkably
concise, but its power is enormous, its scope vast, its effect
sweeping. This, Jalal Toufic’s fifth book, can be read
as a single aphorism, an aphorism composed of aphorisms. And
though it is the shortest of his books to date, it is perhaps
also the greatest.… Toufic’s writings have already
attracted something of a cult following; it is likely that Undying
Love, or Love Dies will bring him a far larger readership.
Certainly that is something to be hoped for. There is, in my
opinion, no more subtle or powerful thinker today than Jalal
Toufic, and none whose ideas are, in the end, more beautiful.
Lyn Hejinian, author of A Border Comedy, The Cold of Poetry,
The Cell, My Life, The Language of Inquiry, and Professor
in the English Department, University of California at Berkeley
Shakespeare, the myth of Orpheus, Sufi poetry and the Qur’an
are not just touched upon lightly here but deeply dissected,
rearranged and returned to their transcendent order within
Toufic’s amorous meditations. By turns mournful and
magical, the book meanders through the Los Angeles of a decidedly
cultured set, yet seems timeless in breadth, convincing in
tone and earned in its broad field of reference. … Set
pieces include a breathless re-creation of the drama of Orpheus’s
ascent from hell (he is a much more melancholic, flawed and
regretful hero in Toufic’s telling) and a ludic, yet
compelling discourse on the Islamic creation myth. In the
latter, Iblis (the Islamic equivalent to Satan) creates, in
a six-day frenzy, the lower emotions (sadness, guilt, idolatry,
sloth) to compensate for the suffering he felt from being
separated from God. The son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian
mother, Toufic lived in Lebanon for 17 years, and Undying
Love is haunted by death, most often seen as a labyrinth
down which the beloved has thoughtlessly become ensconced.
This short book, written in the high postmodern style that
is digressive yet psychologically astute, is also—with
its litany of crushed cities, its violent relationship to
tradition, its intimacy that can’t assuage grieving—a
resonant epigraph for war-torn cultures that pass into memory
with no formal mnemonic, no epics or stone ruins, to keep
them close.
Publishers Weekly, March 2003
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