“Not to write. That’s the formula.” The voice that emerges in Josefina Vicens’s The Empty Book (translated by David Lauer) resists and circles, never quite settling into authorship. This isn’t writer’s block, exactly, but an ethical dilemma: the refusal of self-mythology, of falsity, even of fluency.
To read this novel is to accompany a consciousness both captive to and suspicious of the written word. “All that’s left is the tormented need to write something, and I don’t know what it is.” The ache for expression remains, but any shape it might take is already suspect. What one loves, perhaps, is not the composed self but the one who resists: “that stubborn, hermitic no.”
I’ve not yet finished the novel. Still, what begins as an account of someone who cannot write anything worthwhile is already, unmistakably, an inquiry into the conditions under which writing becomes possible. Why write, if not for oneself? Why read, if not to find something beyond what one already knows? The Empty Book sustains these questions without prematurely resolving them.
[Book 134]