New Book
The elusive French luminary Joseph Joubert is a great explorer of the mind’s open spaces. Edited and translated by Paul Auster, this selection from Joubert’s notebooks introduces a master of the enigmatic who seeks “to call everything by its true name” while asking us to “remember everything is double.” “Joubert speaks in whispers,” Auster writes. “One must draw very close to hear what he is saying.”
About the Author: Joseph Joubert, (born May 6, 1754, Montignac, France—died May 3, 1824, Paris), French man of letters who wrote on philosophical, moral, and literary topics. Joubert published nothing during his lifetime. Throughout his life he wrote in notebooks, on scraps of paper, and on whatever else fell to hand, which he then stored, largely undifferentiated, in a trunk. Chateaubriand was the first to publish selections from this trunk; his Recueil des pensées de M. Joubert (1838) presented Joubert’s writings as relatively tidy pensées, but Chateaubriand heavily reworked his sources. Other landmark editions are Paul de Raynal’s Pensées, essais, et maximes de J. Joubert (2 vol, 1842), which sought to capture the sprawl and messiness of Joubert’s writings but, like Chateaubriand’s edition, shows significant manipulation of the original texts; and André Beaunier’s Les Carnets de Joseph Joubert (2 vol., 1938), which maintains greater fidelity to its sources but falls short of its goal to be a comprehensive chronological record of Joubert’s work.
Own this book? See if Mybookcart is buying The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Sell your book for cash.
