Reviewed by Daniel Green

Since I came to Notes Without a Text unfamiliar with its author, Roberto Bazlan—like, presumably, most readers of this book, which marks the first translation of his writing into English—I first sought out what information I could about Bazlen (known to his friends and colleagues, I discovered, as “Bobi”). Little criticism of his writing exists—at least not in English—but that is unsurprising, since not only have Bazlen’s writings long remained untranslated, but were in fact never published at all during his lifetime. Bazlen didn’t merely choose to keep his work out of circulation (a version of Kafka, say), but actually left almost no tangible work at all. Indeed, Bazlen seems to have approached his one major creative effort, a novel called The Sea Captain, in a way that deliberately ensured it could not be completed. “It is,” writes Roberto Calasso in his introduction to Notes Without a Text, “a part—and a decisive part—of Bazlen’s work not to have produced any work.”