Roberto Bazlen on Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities
Well, the finale to my little reverie on Elif Batuman’s LRB article is now fully two weeks in arrears, and I regret to inform anyone who cares that it will remain so for a bit longer. I suppose I should take all the blame upon myself, but I’d like to think that part of the fault is John Latta’s.
He opened his post last Friday with the question “So who is Roberto Bazlen?” inspired it seems by a reference to Enrique Vila-Matas in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that lead him to a book by Vila-Matas (this one) that spoke of Bazlen thusly:
Bobi Bazlen was a Jew from Trieste who had read every book in every language and who, while possessing a very demanding literary conscience (or perhaps precisely because of this), instead of writing preferred to intervene directly in people’s lives. The fact that he never wrote a book forms part of his work. Bazlen, a kind of black sun of the crisis in the West, is an extremely curious case; his very existence seems to signal the true end of literature, of the absence of output, the death of the author: a writer without books and therefore books without a writer.
Latta learned more (and also about Félix Fénéon, who has been reborn on the internet as an anonymous collective here*):
