Vampires
byJalal Toufic
Vampires is a sort of sequel to Toufic's 1991 debut Distracted, explicitly written for the living and here becoming what Toufic calls an "untimely collaboration" with the author of the original edition and of Vampires too. As one proceeds through the book's aphoristic prose paragraphs, very different eras and states of being seem to flow along and past one another and through the speaker's utterly unique sensibility. The book is thus not so much about what happens when Raymond Roussel repeats a sentence but changes billard (pool table) to pillard (plunderer), or about theories of the effects of "surpassing disaster" on cultures (including Jewish and Shi'ite) and literatures, or about reactions to how love, drunkenness and distraction are rendered by (and in) the deeply interconnected media of memory, film and language. Rather, the book records a kind of double or even multiple experience of these things (what Toufic elsewhere calls an "over-turn"), with eternal recurrence and total dissolution as its horizons. There is nothing else in literature like it.
—Publishers Weekly, 2003
While this expanded and revised edition of Jalal Toufic's second book is at one level “an uneasy essay on the undead in film” as the subtitle states, it is actually much more than that. Drawing on various altered states of consciousness he underwent, films and novels on the undead, psychiatric case studies and mystical reports, the author tackles many of the certainly dubious but also dubiously certain characteristics of the undeath state. Examples include reversals that undo the dead's turn to answer an interpellation, doubles, frequent unworldly freezings that reveal the occasional worldly immobilization of the living as merely “motionless-ness”, (i.e. a variety of movement) the implicit indefinite fall of/into the cadaver, the transforming of the metaphorical into the literal, and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (i.e. lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permitting editing in reality), all inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?"
Although the author's first book, Distracted, was written for the living, Vampires was written about and for those who are "mortals to death" (the title of a special issue the author edited for the journal Discourse). It thus belongs—somewhat edgily, as the author qualifies the validity of guidebooks for the dead—on the same shelf as the Bardo Thödol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
