{"product_id":"uncertain-manifesto-isbn-9781681372860","title":"Uncertain Manifesto","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn illustrated artist's memoir of the motivations, feelings, ideas, figures (including Samuel Beckett and Walter Benjamin), travels, and love affairs that have influenced his life.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe writer and artist Frédéric Pajak was ten when he began to dream of  “a book mixing words and pictures: snippets of adventure, random  memories, maxims, ghosts, forgotten heroes, trees, the raging sea,” but  it was not until he was in his forties that this dream took form as \u003ci\u003eUncertain Manifesto\u003c\/i\u003e.  The utterly original book that he produced is a memoir born of reading  and a meditation on the lives and ideas, the motivations, feelings, and  fates of some of Pajak’s heroes: Samuel Beckett and the artist Bram van  Velde, and, especially, Walter Benjamin, whose travels to Moscow,  Naples, and Ibiza, whose experiences with hashish, whose faltering  marriage and love affairs and critique of modern experience Pajak  re-creates and reflects on in word and image. Pajak’s moody black-and  white drawings accompany the text throughout, though their bearing on it  is often indirect and all the more absorbing for that. Between word and  image, the reader is drawn into a mysterious space that is all Pajak’s  as he seeks to evoke vanished histories and to resist a modern world  more and more given over to a present without a past.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWith the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia\u003c\/i\u003e\"[Pajak] meditates on the need to remember the past in order to understand the present...A complex portrait of the nature and power of narrative.\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"The pieces are quite compelling, succinct and often just slightly off-beat (or off the beaten track, as is the case both with Pajak's personal experiences and, for examples, most of the parts of Benjamin's life he writes about), a neat mix of information and relfection. . . The writing is very good, even as the pieces can feel both stark and abrupt; still, a short chronicle such as 'Two Fascists' certainly makes for a very powerful read. . . Certainly of interst, and certainly engaging-- and leaves one curious about the volumes that follow, and the project as a whole.\" —M.A. Orthofer, \u003ci\u003eThe Complete Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Could Pajak be called an inventor [of the illustrated book]? It remains the case that Frédéric Pajak has brought it to a new perfection.\" —\u003ci\u003eLe Nouvel Observateur\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eUncertain Manifesto\u003c\/i\u003e is amazing, funny, touching. You have the sense that for Pajak making books is a question of life or death.\" —\u003ci\u003eFrance Inter\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"What’s so moving is the combination of thoughtfulness and dreaminess, thoughtfulness about himself and about the world at large, and then there’s the mix of drawing and quotation, of dry humor and modesty. What Frédéric Pajak gives us is a landscape in which thought moves.\u003ci\u003e\" —Le Temps\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrédéric Pajak\u003c\/b\u003e (b. 1955) is a Swiss-French writer and graphic artist born in Suresnes, France. He has written novels and film scripts, and he is a painter, as was his father, Jacques Pajak. He has edited and contributed to cultural and satirical periodicals and is the editor of the highly illustrated biannual journal \u003ci\u003eLes Cahiers dessinés\u003c\/i\u003e, devoted to graphic work ranging from cartooning to the drawings of old masters. But Pajak is best known for a long series of books of unique design which present his own full-page drawings accompanied by a biographical and autobiographical quasi narrative. The first of these works, which made his reputation, was \u003ci\u003eL’Immense solitude\u003c\/i\u003e (1999), which won the Prix Michel-Dentan in 2000. He followed this up with another similarly structured work, \u003ci\u003eLe Chagrin d’amour\u003c\/i\u003e (Broken Hearts), which dealt with Guillaume Apollinaire. Later subjects included Joyce, Luther, Freud, Nietzsche, Cesare Pavese, and Schopenhauer. In the same formal vein, Pajak’s ongoing \u003ci\u003eUncertain Manifesto\u003c\/i\u003e, which began with the present work in 2012, reached its seventh volume in 2018. Volume III was awarded the Prix Médicis (Essai) in 2014. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eDonald Nicholson-Smith\u003c\/b\u003e’s translations of noir fiction include Jean-Patrick Manchette’s \u003ci\u003eThree to Kill\u003c\/i\u003e; Thierry Jonquet’s \u003ci\u003eMygale\u003c\/i\u003e (a.k.a. \u003ci\u003eTarantula\u003c\/i\u003e); and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra’s \u003ci\u003eCousin K\u003c\/i\u003e. He has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB he has translated Manchette’s \u003ci\u003eFatale\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Mad and the Bad\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eIvory Pearl\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eNada\u003c\/i\u003e and Jean-Paul Clébert’s \u003ci\u003eParis Vagabond\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as the French comics \u003ci\u003eThe Green Hand\u003c\/i\u003e by Nicole Claveloux and \u003ci\u003eYellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures\u003c\/i\u003e by Yvan Alagbé. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303172264165,"sku":"NP9781681372860","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781681372860.jpg?v=1767743196","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/uncertain-manifesto-isbn-9781681372860","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}