The Next Profound Silence

“The answer is contained in the one feature unifying the four passions [walking, swimming, writing and reading] to which I’ve just dedicated, respectively the last four ‘paragraphs’: namely, a fifth passion, situated as it were behind the four others, like the sign or figure of their kinship: the passion for solitude.”

If writing is cathartic, it operates not only as a private reckoning with pain, but also as a means to acknowledge loss publicly. It allows a circumvention of the conventions of mourning and its language. In The Great Fire of London, Jacques Roubaud meditates on the death of his wife and the inevitable ending of his parents’ lives. These reflections unfold through memories, in a book that forms the first branch of a larger project. This structure is regulated by intricate textual devices, partly shaped by a mathematical sensibility.

Reading this book can be a vertiginous experience. The effort of following its interpolations and bifurcations may mirror the intensity of its creation. Roubaud positions himself between two mirrors, exploring memory and writing through recursive attention. As both narrator and narrated, he investigates the layered voice described by Coetzee as “the voice of the Other,” which speaks from outside the self. Reticence defines the style. A solitary disposition underlies the poetics of the work.

Mourning and regret saturate The Great Fire of London, though the tone resists elegy. Short, numbered fragments comprise each chapter, which may be read in sequence or by traversing their branching pathways. These interpolations are not diversions but lenses for reflection. The recondite fifth chapter, preceded by an invitation to skip it on a first reading, demands significant effort. Such restraint may indeed be wise for arriving at the final chapter with clarity intact.

Some books demand articulation. After a night steeped in the images and atmosphere of this novel, the necessity of writing about it becomes clear. The experience must be unburdened to fully meet it again.

Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London remains the first branch of a six-part project. The fifth branch, La Bibliothèque de Warburg, is unlikely to appear in English soon. What exists must be approached with what understanding of French can be brought to bear. Alix Cleo Roubaud’s Journal also calls for renewed attention.

The number of unread books may feel daunting. Treasures will go undiscovered. Yet occasionally a book appears—The Great Fire of London among them—that opens into a quiet, edenic intensity. Such books disturb ordinary vision. Their scarcity offers a paradoxical comfort: the reading life, shaped by these rare encounters, becomes less a task of completion and more a search for the next profound silence.