Blanchot, The Book to Come

Reading vol. 3 of Beckett's letters, I come across an admiring reference to Blanchot's The Book to Come (1959, for the original French) and borrow it from the library. The due date sticker in the inside back cover--this sticker, which belongs to the glue-and-paper economy, is an astonishing remnant of childhood libraries, the due-date card, not glued in, but sitting in its manilla pocket--the due date stickers in Blanchot show that this book has been checked out and in many times. Often, when I check out a book, a poetry book, for instance, I  notice that I am the only person who has ever checked that particular book out, and I wonder how many writers go to libraries and surreptitiously see how often their books have been borrowed. 

Blanchot,  page 110 (English translation) :  "Each time that in some new book we grasp again the solitary and silent assertion of the novel understood as the exception...we experience the feeling of a promise and the exultant impression that a new writer, having touched a limit, has succeeded in displacing it and perhaps in fixing it further ahead. [...] These works are rare, fugitive. [...] Some are modest. But all, even the ones that efface themselves, have this strength that comes from a new contact with 'reality'."

It occurs to me that Knaussgaard's My Struggle may be one of these books.