Literature in Pianissimo

I’ve dismantled the bookshelves in my bedroom. Walls of books, so comforting, have now disappeared, replaced by the books in the imaginary museum of all the books in the world – books I can order from the library. What is lost: singularity, specificity: that edition of Rilke’s Malte, that blue smooth-sleeved copy of Finnegan’s Wake, that puckered copy of Pound’s Pisan Cantos. Lost from my bedroom: the presence of what is called modern literature, the vast presence of books each of which turned another literature towards me: literature become dark, unreadable: literature which says ‘I will not serve …’: literary books become monuments without access, obscure monoliths …

Yet it paralyzed me, too – something had come to an end; a culture had withdrawn. These destructive books, book-explosions seem to call now for a literature in pianissimo – a quiet writing, prose bound in no more than one hundred and fifty pages, prose with few adjectives, unlyrical, restrained, because of a suspicion of literary lushness which you still find in the new books in the bookshops. A modest prose, modest in the wake of the big books which destroyed literature, modest as they speak in quiet voices, liable to be ignored as if they each included no more than the piping of the mouse-singer of Kafka’s story.

These are the foolish thoughts I have as I read Aaron Appelfeld.