Palace of Books
by Roger Grenier
translated by Alice Kaplan
(University of Chicago, 2014)
Committing a crime means taking action. But accounting for a crime in the newspaper or on radio and television means transforming that action into a story, into words. … The public that feasts on crime needs its stories to have a beginning, a middle, and a n end. It needs a small novel, more exciting than fiction because it’s true.
Page 3.
The writer who tells a well-rounded story makes order in the world.
Page 5.
Getting close to the material truth of an event does not bring television any closer to its meaning.
Page 6.
Journalists are of one mind with the courts and with most of the public. They all want human beings to be logical and to commit only logical actions, even if those actions are criminal. They weigh the act committed in a moment of passion on the scales of reason. They’ll do anything to make the sad hero of the crime tale act in character so they can then come up with a rational explanation for his case.
Page 7.
Readers love clichés.
Page 9.
Whenever you use myth as a starting point for invention you find reality.
Page 11.
Waiting is what you erase from your experience.
Page 20.
Impatience is waiting’s most constant companion.
Page 20.
Entire lives are spent under the illusion that nothing has begun.
Page 22.
Waiting is both hope … and resignation.
Page 23.
Some people take pleasure in waiting for what will never happen, what can’t happen.
Page 26.
Waiting makes us into Pavlov’s dogs, for whom a certain odor, a certain color, a certain noise resonates, plunging us into an anguish as new and as old as our unhappiness.
Page 27.
It seems that one of the first acts inseparable from waiting is reading. Your eyes follow the length of a line and your mind waits for your eyes to advance, impatient to know what will happen next. But you have to be patient.
Page 31.
Waiting can be understood in terms of power. In any meeting there is the person who is waiting and the person who makes him wait, who has the satisfaction of being waited for.
Page 31.
The human condition: on Monday, you wait for the weekend, and on Sunday you can’t stand the waiting for Monday. You wait for vacation and for vacation to end. You wait for retirement, all the while dreading it. You dream wistfully of the death of your partner, with whom you have waited too long. You don’t wait for death, despite the fact that this is the only thing it would be reasonable to wait for, indeed to wish for.
Page 32.
Once it becomes an instrument of religion, waiting itself can become a religion, since we have built temples for it: waiting rooms.
Page 33.
Misery is when there is no more waiting possible.
Page 34.
It may be said without pomposity, and without playing on words, that suicide is at times the most sensible action n life.
Page 39.
Suicide is a precipice you walk along, which makes you more or less dizzy, depending on the day and on your mood.
Page 41.
The idea of suicide is a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.
Page 41.
People have their good and their good reasons for dying. It is true that the reason matters less than the act. The reason can be excellent or stupid; if the act succeeds, you’re nothing but a cadaver, meaning you’re nothing.
Page 42.
The hereditary tendency to commit suicide, its frequency according to sex, age group, profession, social class, country, leads us to believe that although we have the impression we are choosing suicide, suicide is choosing us.
Pages 42-43.
The right to put an end to your life is an individual liberty. As with all liberties, it amounts to a fight against the Church, the State, against anyone who pretends to have exclusive rights over our lives.
Page 44.
The right to contradict oneself amounts to helping people accept who they are – beings struggling with several different impulses, some conscious, others hidden.
Pages 45-46.
The right to contradict oneself amounts to a shock for any philosophy, since what the philosopher seeks is unity.
Page 46.
We can’t be both white and black. But we can be white, then black.
Page 47.
We had to contradict ourselves quite lot to change our way of thinking.
Page 47.
Maturity makes us realize we have worshipped false idols.
Page 47.
Nowadays we have scribblers who manage to pass themselves off as writers because they’ve already made a name for themselves as celebrities.
Page 55.
A book is the product of a different self than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.
Page 56.
One retreats into oneself in order to communicate better with others.
Page 61.
In the life of a man or a woman there are always one or two things that he or she will never consent to speak about, not for anything. Secret gardens.
Page 62.
Humiliation is a feeling that very few people can tolerate. But it has inspired many books.
Page 63.
To concentrate on the sources is to misunderstand the very nature of literary creation.
Page 71.
Fiction can teach us more about ourselves than reality
Page 75.
The accounts we settle with ourselves on paper are the most personal of all. Real private life is in writing.
Page 75.
Anyone who writes needs a room of their own, a place where they are alone with their writing. And, in their private life, this will be the most private place.
Page 75.
The most private thing in the private lives of writers is their relationship to writing.
Page 76.
Without love, our literature would soon become anemic.
Page 77.
Talking about separation is another way of expressing love.
Page 78.
The fundamental paradox of the novel remains. It is a fiction, a made-up story that allows us to seek and to find the truth about people and about the world. And love is one of the essential parts of that truth.
Page 79.
What would there be to say about love it it weren’t thwarted?
Page 80.
Writing is more or less an enterprise of seduction. Seduction of the reader.
Page 81.
If our books aren’t destined for immortality, at least they can become the enduring passwords, the precious relics in lovers’ memories.
Page 83.
The destiny of the novella, in the modern sense, appears to be linked to economic conditions. It really took off in certain countries and at a certain stage when there were newspapers and magazine capable of supporting it.
Page 87.
What is the difference between a short story and a novel? The main difference lies in the experience of the author. The short story, extracted from reality, is a story with a beginning and an end that seems drawn from life (whereas in real life, most of the time you don’t know exactly when a story begins and ends). You write it quickly and then you forget about it. But a novel is a companion who lives with you for months, sometimes years.
Pages 88-89.
Death and frivolity condemn us never to finish.
Page 93.
Unfinished should not be confused with abandoned.
Page 96.
Between grief and noting I will take grief.
Page 99.
Which is worse? To be unfinished or to be finished?
A strange dog starts to follow you in the mountains. Then suddenly he turns around. You no longer interest him.
Page 103.
Death expects nothing of us.
Page 109.
Writing forces you to consider the problem of posterity, even if you don’t give a damn.
Page 116.
You can’t write if you’re not imbued with what others have written before you … every book takes into account the books that preceed it and is, in a sense, their sequel.
Page 119.
The essence of a writer’s biography is in the list of books he has read.
Page 120.
It’s strange how often we\re labeled without having done anything to deserve it.
Page 121.
Writing turned into a habit, if not a mania - a mania into which I sank further every day, so that now, I’m incapable of enjoying any other activity, any other distraction.
Page 122.
One can also write out of a desire to be alone, to enjoy one’s own company, faced with a sheet of paper. But more often one writes because one is too alone.
Page 124.
Certain people … don’t write to write, but to have written. To pose as writers. That can explain the strange behavior of people who hire ghostwriters in order to attain the status of writer.
Page 126.
We’re on earth to understand the essential, to save ourselves. Thus literature, in the absence of religion, remains in my opinion the only path.
`` Page 127.
Nothing seemed to me more important than a book. I regarded the library as a temple.
Page 128.
Literature and religion are certainly connected, for many see in writing a creation, that is, a way to survive, a promise of eternity.
Page 128.
Paper turns to dust. Nowadays, oblivion comes faster and faster.
Page 128.
One can do what one wants with one’s life, since, in the end, without exception we all fall into the same void.
Page 129.
Literature is a compensatory activity.
Page 129.
Freud too thought that literature, and art more generally, were compensatory activities. They are the expression of a desire that renounces satisfaction in realty.
Page 129.
Writing can save us from the absurd.
Page 130.
The writer cannot work unless he imagines a public … This public influences not only content, but form.
Page 130.
Often keeping a diary is the manifestation of a desire to survive. This presumes a lot.
Page 135.
Looking to literature to reach what is deepest in oneself, to discover the meaning of life, comes in large part from the evolution of the novel in modern times.
Page 135.
The novel aims to fix a destiny.
Page 135.
The novel doesn’t succeed by capturing or fixing reality or its equivalent trough the accuracy of its copy - i.e. by realism. Its truth is in style, in emotion, in movement. Emotion is what counts.
Page 136.
Frequently writing is driven by the memory of suffering, of past humiliations.
Page 137.