Louis-René des Forêts, born in 1918 and died almost urgently December 30, 2000 (as if he had not wanted to cross the border to take him to die outside of the twentieth century), is one of the most important writers of the same century. Maurice Blanchot, Edmond Jabès, Yves Bonnefoy, Pascal Quignard, among others, confirm this. His work, secret and thorough, barely passes the 10 titles, culminating in Ostinato, book written over nearly twenty years and published in 1997 with the express statement that is literally endless.

Composed of a series of fragments that could be endless, book, Ostinato, however, lies in the reason for the ostinato mode retain a sense despite lacking expressly end. Remember that the basso ostinato composition is a procedure used since the Renaissance, consisting of the repetition of an unchanging rhythmic formula, always present in the many thematic variations of a musical piece. The ostinato is the only hope that the dispersion of the fragments that make up a piece not become a hubbub inaudible.

With Ostinato, Louis-René des Forêts write a doubly fragmentary work: fragments of writing about also fragments: childhood, literature or memories, fragments of life, fragments even death (father, mother, friends, his own daughter, dead drowned in 1965 at age fourteen, whose death, modestly hidden, is present throughout the book as a recurring motif ...), to finally become a real piece of his own death and silence so eagerly sought behind all the words employed.

A work of which we do not know whether to admire more his extraordinary mastery of language, its extreme beauty or uncompromising commitment to the silence and the will of its author erased in what, properly speaking, is an autobiography without me (scarcely a "him" surrounded by personal forms of the verb), the search for a language: "Here there is only random figures, ways of footprint, fugitive lifelines, false reflections and doubtful signs that the language in search of a home registered as smuggling and from the outside without showing their value or deepen their background, carving in the darkened memory body the most elemental part-colors, smells, rumors-, all you breathe outdoors in the truth of a fable and fears depths. »

Because if Louis-René des Forêts remains faithful to his (words of Pascal Quignard dedicated to him) "vow of silence" is not so much talking "to say nothing" but keeping alive the language, which does not believe and on which no illusion is, to lead to its failure, become a voice ( "a voice coming from elsewhere," according to Maurice Blanchot) which abolishes his words while watching the silence that lurks He loses both its raison d'être as what its name says.