JCC: A Mirror Life

Trying to give an account of Jean-Claude Charles’s life, and so shed light on his work, is a dangerous undertaking in more ways than one. In general, talking about the dead when they’re no longer around to defend themselves is risky. We can already hear the worried cries of some friend or loved one: “Absolutely not! He wasn’t like that at all!” The complexity grows when the dead person produced a body of literary work. After all, what he had to say, he wrote. Period. Why go through this further exercise? Why testify to something else? Yet we were persuaded