Synopses & Reviews
As stubborn, as surprising, as artful as life in its refusal to conform to a particular literary genre, Marcel Bénabous book is at once a memoir and a novel, a confession and a reflection on the prerogatives and imperatives of writing ones story. At its center, forever alluring and elusive, is the beautiful and ethereal Tamara, the exact incarnation of our narrators most enduring fantasy—a femme fatale for the lover of form. Who precisely our narrator is, is less certain: The young Manuel, who leaves his home in Morocco to study in Paris, only to encounter the enticing Tamara? Or the mature Manuel, looking back not only at Tamara but also at the younger mans reading of his experience through the pages of the literature of sentimental apprenticeship, from Stendhals
The Red and the Black through Flauberts
Sentimental Education?A heady, genre-defying high-wire act by a writer who delights in such undertakings and whose efforts consistently delight readers worldwide, To Write on Tamara? captures with graceful authority and assurance the now thrilling, now vexing complexities of living and writing lifes stories, especially stories of love.
Review
"This is a book that has all the earmarks of a clever postmodern novel, but it actually takes the form of a rather straightforward memoir. Its dual theme-falling in love and trying to make sense of that love through narrative-is universal." -Rain Taxi.
(Rain Taxi)
Review
"An enjoyable fiction, both simply as a description of student life in the late 1950s and early 1960s and as a clever (but not obsessively so) literary game."--The Complete Review
(The Complete Review)
About the Author
Marcel Bénabou lives in Paris and pursues his positions as professor of ancient history at the University of Paris and as the permanent provisional secretary of Oulipo. He is the author of Dump This Book While You Still Can! and Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books, both published by the University of Nebraska Press. Steven Rendall, a professor emeritus of Romance languages at the University of Oregon, is the author of Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently and has translated numerous books.