Memoir/Philosophy
Undying Love or Love Dies
By Jalal Toufic
*OUT OF PRINT*Dowload a PDF version from Jalal Toufic's website.
Undying Love or Love Dies reads like a diary of a jilted lover. In love letters to a wife who left him, Toufic embarks on an autobiographical monologue and philosophical investigation that goes everywhere and anywhere on the book’s ostensible subject of love. Jalal, poet/philosopher, speaks of everything that comes to his mind; his digressions read like a dream sequence or series of film clips revealing an ever changing landscape of places, feelings, and thoughts that take the reader from Los Angeles to Beirut, from Woody Allen to Kierkegaard, from unbearable woe to acceptance of this ever changing nature of reality and love.
Undying Love or Love Dies, Jalal Toufic’s fifth book, can be read as an aphorism composed of aphorisms and though it is the shortest of his books to date, it is perhaps also the greatest….. Under love’s rubric, themes from Toufic’s earlier books reappear — memory, the untimely occurrence, the undead of history and their recurrence in film, the hyperrealities of oblivion, ruination. The book is set in contexts (and particularly that of the contemporary Arab World) in which not time but other, faster forces are bringing about an end to things…. It is true that we will inevitably be separated from the beloved; it is true that the beloved is the one we are inadequate to remember even (and perhaps especially) when we are nearby. But it is true too that the beloved is the one we can never forget…..There is, in my opinion, no more subtle or powerful thinker today than Jalal Toufic, and none whose ideas are, in the end, more beautiful.
—Lyn Hejinian
Shakespeare, the myth of Orpheus, Sufi poetry and the Qu'ran are not just touched upon lightly here but deeply dissected, rearranged and returned to their transcendent order within Toufic's amorous meditations. By turns mournful and magical, the book meanders through the Los Angeles of a decidedly cultured set, yet seems timeless in breadth, convincing in tone and earned in its broad field of reference. Toufic relishes the paradoxes of love, finding in the absence of the beloved the ripe territory of spiritual contradiction: "Love brings about a stark alteration of the couple's seclusion from the world.... While writing this tonight, am I not serving to advance some other person's desperate waiting for his beloved?" Set pieces include a breathless re-creation of the drama of Orpheus's ascent from hell (he is a much more melancholic, flawed and regretful hero in Toufic's telling) and a ludic, yet compelling discourse on the Islamic creation myth. In the latter, Iblis (the Islamic equivalent to Satan) creates, in a six-day frenzy, the lower emotions (sadness, guilt, idolatry, sloth) to compensate for the suffering he felt from being separated from God. The son of an Iraqi father and a Palestinian mother, Toufic lived in Lebanon for 17 years, and Undying Love is haunted by death, most often seen as a labyrinth down which the beloved has thoughtlessly become ensconced. This short book, written in the high postmodern style that is digressive yet psychologically astute, is also-with its litany of crushed cities, its violent relationship to tradition, its intimacy that can't assuage grieving-a resonant epigraph for war-torn cultures that pass into memory with no formal mnemonic, no epics or stone ruins, to keep them close.
—Publisher's Weekly
2002 49 pages $13.00 ISBN: 978-0-942996-47-0Dowload a PDF version from Jalal Toufic's website.
