Le Murmure

This is Christian Bobin’s last book, whose final lines he wrote on his hospital bed, having begun the text at his home in Le Creusot in July 2022. A true testamentary work, it is “a collection at once modest, heartrending and joyful, never mawkish. A short book entirely in his manner, a succession of fragments somewhere between a logbook and prose poetry. Not a single cliché, not a line that an artificial intelligence could have generated. ‘Writing is a fresh cloth stretched on a thread of ink,’ he invents, for instance, in the opening pages. In short, a miraculous posthumous distillation of Bobin” (Denis Cosnard, Le Monde des livres, February 2024).

“Find me something more beautiful than writing, you dogs!” He might have added reading, which he himself invokes at the end of Le Murmure: “One must enter a poem once the poet is dead. Otherwise it makes too much noise, like suddenly lighting up the henhouse.”