L’Écriture ou la Vie

“When I returned from Buchenwald, at the end of April 1945, I was a little over twenty years old. Since the age of seven, I had decided to become a writer. As soon as I returned, I wanted to write about the experience I had just lived through. A few months later, having written, rewritten and destroyed hundreds of pages, I realized that, unlike other survivors — notably Robert Antelme and above all Primo Levi, who freed themselves from the horror of memory through writing — the opposite was happening to me. To remain in that memory meant certainly failing to produce a book, and perhaps ending in suicide. So I decided to abandon writing in favor of life — hence the title, and that ‘or.’”

The title itself came to him seventeen years later, on a Saturday in April, while he was writing Netchaïev est de retour: “I was recounting a scene in which one of the novel’s characters goes to Buchenwald to try to find a fellow deportee from the Resistance. It was meant to take up two pages. That day, the writing veered off completely. I found myself writing, in the first person, another book: those were the opening pages of L’Écriture ou la Vie. My unconscious, or something, had played a curious trick on me: that Saturday, 11 April, was the anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald, and the first news I heard the next day was the announcement of Primo Levi’s suicide… Under those circumstances, I obviously had to see the book through to its end.”

A copy in perfect condition.