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Partita and A Winter in Zürau
Partita Fiction and non-fiction are two sides of the same coin. Or are they? Michael Penderecki is in flight. Someone has threatened to kill him. But who is the woman dead in the bathtub? And why does the voice of Yves Montand singing 'Les Feuilles Mortes' surge from the horn of an antiquated phonograph in an otherwise silent villa in Sils Maria? This is the most enigmatic – and melodramatic – of Gabriel Josipovici's novels to date. It is as though one of Magritte's paintings had come to life to the rhythms of a Bach Partita. A Winter in Zürau Fiction and non-fiction are two sides of the same coin. Or are they? Franz Kafka is in flight. After spitting blood and being diagnosed with tube...
What Ever Happened to Modernism?
The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness...
Touch
Josipovici moves from a Charlie Chaplin film to passages from Proust, from the world of sport to the world of addiction, from medieval pilgrimages to the cult of relics, from a wedding photograph of his grandparents to some of Chardin's most enigmatic paintings. Through these seemingly disparate topics he provides engaging and wise commentary on connection and communication in life. Contrasting the senses of sight and touch, Josipovici notes that although sight seems to give us the totality of what we behold, it is only when we walk or feel our way across the distances that things become more than images and begin to constitute the world in which we, as touchers and not mere observers, are included. If we depend on sight - which seems to offer a frictionless domination over reality - we may avoid the pains and uncertainties of living, but we also lose our involvement with life.
Mobius the Stripper
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100 Days
When in March 2020 the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown Gabriel Josipovici decided that he would respond to a unique situation by writing an essay a day for a hundred days, prefacing each with a diary entry, keeping track of the changing seasons as well as the pandemic. As organising and generating principle for the essays he chose the alphabet, and the result is a stimulating kaleidoscope of topics from Aachen to Zoos, passing by Alexandria, Luciano Berio, Ivy Compton-Burnett, reflections on his own early works The Echo-Chamber and Flow, Langland's Piers Plowman, the idea of repetition in life and art, and much else. Josipovici reminds us that he has previously '...
Forgetting
We cannot understand the phenomenon of remembering without invoking its opposite, forgetting. Taking his cue from Beckett - 'only he who forgets remembers' - Josipovici uncovers a profound cultural shift from societies that celebrated ritual remembrance at fixed times and places, to our own Western world where the lack of such mechanisms leads to a fear of forgetting, to what Nietzsche diagnosed as an unhealthy sleeplessness that infects every aspect of our culture. Moving from the fear of Alzheimer's to invocations of 'Remember the Holocaust' and 'Remember Kosovo' by unscrupulous demagogues, from the burial rituals of rural societies to the Berlin and Vienna Holocaust Memorials, from eighteenth-century disquiet about the role of tombs and inscriptions to the late poems of Wallace Stevens, Josipovici has produced, in characteristic style, a small book with a very big punch. Gabriel Josipovici's novel The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Only Joking
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Echoes and Mirrorings
This study is the first monograph on the contemporary British novelist and playwright Gabriel Josipovici (1940- ), author of fourteen novels and several dozens of short stories, some thirty plays for radio and the stage, and of a considerable oeuvre in literary criticism. Gabriel Josipovici, also known as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, is now one of the foremost British writers who continue the tradition of Modernism. Josipovici also figures among the most prominent Jewish authors writing in the UK today. This study includes an interview with the author and presents an overview of Josipovici's creative oeuvre. Close readings of a selection of short stories, novels, plays and radio plays are followed by an attempt to place Josipovici on the map of present-day British literature.
The Book of God
Is the Bible one book or a collection of writings? If it is a book, does it stand as a coherent piece of literature? Building on the recently renewed interest in biblical narrative associated with Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, and Robert Alter, Gabriel Josipovici here sets out to answer these and other equally fascinating questions. Developing his argument through close textual analysis, Josipovici draws on his deep knowledge and appreciation of medieval and modern art and literature and on his personal understanding of the possibilities of narrative. His beautifully written book not only lifts literary-biblical criticism to a new level but also makes the Bible accessible to our secular age...
Everything Passes
"Everything passes. The good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow. Everything passes." "Or does it?" "A man stands at a window. Behind him, an empty room. Fragments of conversation drop into his head, with his first and second wife, with his children, friends. Slowly a life can be pierced together. But something is wrong. Something refuses to make senses. It has to do with writing, with the rush of words onto the page, and with death. And it will not go away."--BOOK JACKET.
