Works
Novels
Story and other collections
Theatre
Editing & commentary
Non-fiction
Books about GJ
Everything Passes (October 2006)
Carcanet Press
A mysterious web of solitude, love, illness, and loss is seamlessly woven into a captivating historical and personal narrative in this poignant yet concise novel. As three characters move through their increasingly haunting lives, they discover how to piece together their past and recreate connections.
Publisher's information
Review at Ready Steady Book
Review at Tales from the Reading Room
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Only Joking, published in Germany as Nur ein Scherz (2005)
Publisher's information
Review at Ready Steady Book
in Der Spiegel
German edition available from Amazon.de
Goldberg: Variations (December 2002)
Carcanet Press
REVIEW BY STEPHEN MITCHELMORE
"Taking his cue from an anecdote connected with Bach's late masterpiece, the Goldberg Variations, Gabriel Josipovici imagines an English Writer at the turn of the eighteenth century, a Jew who is invited to the house of a country gentleman in order to read to him in the evening and send him to sleep. The thirty 'Variations' can be read as disconnected stories on varied topics -- incest in the Orkneys, madness in Chester, a poetic competition at the court of George III, a marital quarrel -- or as a weaving together of past and present until a bizarre climax in achieved.
"Part an homage to Bach, partly pure fiction conjuring ghosts from the past -- Holderlin, Kierkegaard and others haunt its margins -- this is a book as exciting, though-provoking and entertaining as any Josipovici has written." --from the cover
UK edition available from Amazon UK
Amazon US
US edition available from
Amazon US
Barnes & Noble US
Now
Manchester, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1998
Written entirely in dialogue, this novel is about families, parents and children, partners and lovers. The incidents are commonplace: going to work, the weekend, the afternoon of furtive sex, the art exhibition. The novel is about now, where urban people are today, and where they might go.
Softcover edition ISBN: 185754367X
available from Barnes & Noble US
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German editions available from Amazon DE |
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Moo Pak
London, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1994.
Covering 151 pages in paragraphless text, Moo Pak is the story of an
irregular friendship between Damien Anderson and a writer, Jack Toledano.
Although the narrator is Anderson, the novel is almost entirely in the
reported words of Toledano. As the friends walk around London, Toledano
tells Anderson of his progress in writing a novel about the stately mansion
Moor Park in Surrey, variously the home of Jonathan Swift, a base for the
study of chimpanzees, and a decoding centre during the Second World War.
This leads him into monologues of extraordinary range and erudition, often
with half a dozen references to artists and writers on each page. It is a
stimulating and often hilarious satire on those "ambitious" novels dealing
with world history that seem to appear every few weeks. It ends with a
moving twist in the tale.
An essay about Moo Pak by Haddayr Copley-Woods on line
Hardcover ISBN: 1857540905
available from Barnes & Noble US
Softcover ISBN: 1857542878
available from Barnes & Noble US
London, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1993.
New York, New Directions, 1995.
In a series of conversations that take place in his friends house in Putney Heath, Ben tells of a vacation to the Dolomites that signalled the end of his relationship with Sand, his girlfriend at the time, but opened up the possibility of a new one with the reserved, even somewhat remote, Liliane, or Lily. She had just been to Siena, looking for a garden in a hotel that was a significant place for her grandmother, a Jewish woman from Constantinople, who spent an ordinary day there, a day that became extraordinary because of the war and its effects on the family. To Lily that day in the hotel garden has become a way for her understand herself, her family, and the Holocaust. Constructed mostly from dialogue, the book presents multiple portraits of Ben, his friends, and the two women, along with a strong sense of the texture of their lives, while unfolding the story of Lily and her grandmother's day in the hotel garden.
Softcover US edition ISBN 0811212912
available from Barnes & Noble US
Hardcover UK edition ISBN 085635998X
possibly available from Amazon UK
Manchester, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1991
A meditation on art and its creation, in the form of a series of notes by the artist Harsnet on the making of Big Glass, based on Marcel Duchamp's Large Glass and its accompanying notes. Harsnet is a wit and a prankster, and his notes record much of his life at the time in the form of a continuous stream of information and reflection that indiscriminately incorporates shopping lists and other mundane details of his life. The reader sees part of the plot through the marginal notations and explanatory writings of a former fellow artist, Goldberg, now turned critic and teacher, who is transcribing the notes. The careful construction of the novel delivers the story with clarity, along with a good deal of humor, and with an unexpected ending.
Hardcover edition ISBN 085635905
available from Barnes & Noble US
Manchester, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1986
Obsession and rejection are the main themes of this novel about a woman who feels rejected by her parents, particularly by her mother. Her father, a painter, ignores the emotional turmoil all around him and continues to work, while his wife shows signs of mental breakdown. This novel was shortlisted for the 1986 Whitbread Fiction Prize.
Hardcover ISBN: 0856356417
available from Barnes & Noble US
Softcover Carcanet Press, Ltd. 1998 ISBN: 1857544102
available from Barnes & Noble US
London, Methuen, 1984
out of print
"In a quiet room, in a flat, an old woman lies in bed. Beside her sits her niece, a regular visitor. They gossip and reminisce. They are allies and also antagonists.
"Other people are also in the flat, to whom the two female voices -- one querulous and distinct, the other higher and softer -- are audible. They too have roles in the conversation, and in the elliptical, impenetrable ebb and flow of past and present relationships.
"This timeless configuration, reflective and sonorous, is the setting of Gabriel Josipovici's funny yet sharply penetrating new novel. Simple in form, its effect is complex and remarkable, a Chinese box of a book which ultimately examines the nature of fiction itself. This is a haunting and impressive work which marks a new level of achievement by a prize-winning novelist." --from the dust jacket
Brighton & Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1981
Runner-up for the Booker Prize
out of print
"Like all his work, [The Air We Breathe] is penetratingly intelligent and
convincingly eerie, yet it achieves a new clarity and light. Concerned above
all with the difficulties inherent in human communication outside and beyond
language, The Air We Breathe conveys a sense of achievement and release, in
which it is impossible to separate the triumph of the heroine -- in her
search to understand her haunting past -- from the artistic triumph of the
author." -- from the dust jacket
Brighton & Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1980
out of print
"Set in an English country house, this novel combines the comedy of manners with the acerbity of the psychological thriller.
"At first glance, the house appears to be a haven in which Peter can recover from the breakdown which has left him without a past. But there is something ominous about the inhabitants which soon challenges his precarious security. For Peter the house in the country becomes a chamber of echoes … or is it a chamber of horrors?
"His friendship with Vonnie gives him hope that he can, with her help, unravel the mystery of the past and so regain his confidence in the future. Yet the echoes which haunt him from just beyond the reach if his memory assume terrifying proportions and drive him helplessly towards a tragedy which he realises he cannot avert and for which he must assume responsibility." -- from the dust jacket
London, Gollancz, 1975
out of print
The Present is about the present, with its infinite, unrealised possibilities, a gift that withers and crumbles before it reaches us. It is a myriad realities, all equally probable, all equally unreal: Minna and Reg, married and childless, sharing their North London flat with their eccentric lodger, Alex; Minna married to Alex and living in the country with him and their two children; Minna in hospital after a breakdown, subject to fantasies and frightening memories; Minna and Reg in their North London flat trying to come to terms with Alex's suicide. Which of these realities is present, which past, which imagined, which lived through.
The novel is concerned not so much to tell a story as to explore a state: that feeling of being becalmed, adrift in a present cut off from past or future, when the imagination churns furiously and at random, re-arranging compulsively a handful of elements into story after story. But, as the novel develops, it grows clear that is there is to be any escape from this state it will lie not in the feverish construction of yet more stories but in the recognition and acceptance of the hardly bearable absence of all stories. -- from the cover
Brighton & Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1977
out of print
The epigraph is from the Hebrew Bible: "Arise and go, for this is not your rest." (Micah 2:10). A man walks down a deserted road in South London. It is night. He falters, then falls. He lies still under the glare of the street lamps. A man paces up and down an empty room. He pauses at the window, looks down into the sunlit street. Is it the same man? Who is he? Why is he there?
As we read, we become aware that these questions are being asked not only by us but within the book itself. We grow gradually conscious of a self-searching desperately, despairingly, for a place in which to settle. -- from the dust jacket:
In the conclusion to The Mirror of Criticism, "True Confessions of an Experimentalist," Josipovici responds angrily to the sneering, or at best patronising, reviews for this novel. While they saw only a wilful abstraction, Josipovici says the novel was "written more directly from the heart than anything else of mine" and worried it might be "too raw, too personal." He argues that the criticism was due less to the novel's faults than to the reviewers' assumptions about what is "natural" writing and what is not.
London, Gollancz, 1971
out of print
"Louis and Helen's marriage is rubbing along comfortably when an old flame of his, Jo, proposes to pay them a short visit. The suggestion is a little odd: Jo has been out of touch with Louis for years, and she has never met Helen. But Helen seems quite agreeable to the idea, and it's Louis who is somewhat disconcerted, edgy, ready to make difficulties. Jo arrives with her small daughter Gillian, whom she hasn't mentioned, and who proves to be a most disconcerting child, remote and brooding.
"The visit passes pleasantly enough, at least on the surface. The ice is thin, but that doesn't deter the protagonists from performing formal exercises of great dexterity with splendid aplomb. The very quite cut and thrust of the dialogue is masterly, carrying understatement to the point of being witty in itself. Soon Jo and Louis are delicately probing into their old affair, asking each other how it came to end. Jo hadn't wanted it to end, nor had Louis: there had been a sad misunderstanding. And now? Well, they could still run away together, couldn't they?
"Another source of tension in the household is provided by Louis's brother Peter, who delights in private jokes at the expense of everyone, unnerving descriptions of events that have never actually happened.
"In and out of the talk, the dinner parties, the swimming sessions, wanders the silent little girl, observing, keeping herself to herself even when the next-door children invite her to play.
"With extreme economy and exact precision Words tells us all we need to know about a complex emotional situation. As Harold Pinter wrote, Gabriel Josipovici has 'a very individual voice'." -- from the dust jacket
London, Michael Joseph, 1968
out of print
"Invent. Inventory. The title is ambiguously suggestive, pointing both inwards to the world of imagination and memory, and outwards to the everyday world of material objects.
What happened in those few months Susan spent in the flat with Sam and the old man? Her compulsive monologues, groping for the answer amid the neutral surfaces of the objects once in their possession and now to be inventoried, trying out then discarding one explanation after another, slowly uncover the clichés by which each of us tries to master experience and to give meaning to his life.
Other characters include the mysterious Brown, the overwrought Gill Clemm and her three offspring, Mick, Brigid, and Baby Choo. Oscar has a non-speaking part, and the incidents range from a brawl in a pub to a late-night encounter with the police.
Gabriel Josipovici's short novel combines formal elegance with verbal wit. The book develops out of three intertwining time-schemes. The description and narration which form the bulk of most novels has been replaced by a sharp and swiftly-moving dialogue that brings the characters immediately to life. It is in fact a very uncomplicated book, haunting and at times extremely funny." --from the dust jacket
Story and other collections
Novels
Story and other collections
Theatre
Editing & commentary
Non-fiction
Books about GJ
Manchester, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1990
out of print
A collection including the novels The Inventory and The Air We Breathe, with stories and plays taken from above collections.
Softcover edition ISBN: 0856358738
available from Barnes & Noble US
In the Fertile Land
(includes three of Four Stories)
Manchester, Carcanet Press, Ltd., 1987
out of print
Contents include
Death of the Word
Second Person Looking Out
Memories of a Mirrored Room in Hamburg
Brothers
The Bird Cage
Absence and Echo
Children's Voices
A Changeable Report
Fuga
Waiting
That Which is Hidden is That Which is Shown;
That Which is Shown is That Which is Hidden
In the Fertile Land
He
Volume IV, pp. 167-9
Getting Better
Steps
Exile
The Bitter End
Distances
London, Menard Press, 1977
out of print
The stories
Contiguities
Death of the Word
Second Person Looking Out
He
Stories and Short Plays
London, Gollancz, 1974
out of print
The stories
The Voices
Little Words
It Isn't as if it Wasn't
Colourings
Seascape with Figures
Mobius the Stripper
This
The Reconstruction
Refuse
The short plays
One
Dreams of Mrs Fraser
Flow
London, Span, The Windsor Arts Centre Press, 1981
out of print
Brindisi, 19 B.C. Vergil has arrived from Athens with the Emperor Augustus's fleet, bound for Rome. He has caught a chill on the voyage and this has rapidly grown worse. He lies in his room in the royal palace. In one corner of the room there is a metal casket which encloses the manuscript of the 'Aeneid', which the poet insists on carrying with him everywhere.
As his strength begins to fail he reviews his life. He is troubled by the feeling that he has devoted his greatest imaginative powers to furnishing Rome with glorious self-images. He feels that he has separated himself from a deeper level of honesty and fulfilment. Above all, he is gripped by the fear that he has only been a spectator of life: "You cannot go on living since you have never lived... You have not turned the spark into a flame, you have only used it to liqht up your corpse."
This monologue, with its extraordinary variety of rhythms, moods and images, forms a prism for the historical imagination, not only bringing the past to life, but casting the present in a new light. The play is ultimately about the torment of consciousness itself -- the fact that whatever consciousness reveals of life, it also seems to separate us from natural fulfilment and substitutes a representation which can never be fully equated with life.
'Vergil Dying' was written for Paul Scofield, who rendered it in a brilliant radio performance, first broadcast on 29 March 1979. -- from the cover
The Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991-2004
Carcanet, 2006
The novelist Gabriel Josipovici's new book of essays ranges from writings on the Bible, Shakespeare, Kafka, Borges and the Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld to considerations of Rembrandt's self-portraits, death in Tristram Shandy, and what Kierkegaard has to tell us about the writing of fiction. From the title piece, which examines the relationship between artists' works and their beliefs, to the concluding meditations on memory and the Holocaust, The Singer on the Shore is unified by the twin themes of Jewish experience, with its consciousness of exile and the time-bound nature of human activity, and of the role of the work of art as a toy, to be played with and dreamed about.
Josipovici's explorations are informed by his own experience as a novelist. He is thus both authoritative and undogmatic. This volume, like a book of poems, rewards repeated reading: it not only illuminates the topics with which it deals, it also raises the large question of the place of art in life and of the possibilities open to art today.
'Gabriel Josipovici is a deeply perceptive critic, always rewarding with a wide range of reference. The Singer on the Shore is a beautifully written and enjoyable book.' - Dame Muriel Spark --from the publisher's page
http://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781857548440
London, London Magazine Editions, 2001
"Born in Egypt, of European Jewish extraction, she married in France in the 1930s, separated, and escaped from Nice in 1944. After the war she returned to Egypt, then moved to England for the sake of her son’s education. For a short time, while her son was at Oxford, she lived in Putney and worked in a bookshop. Then she moved into a house with him outside Oxford because it was cheaper than paying two lots of rent (she worked at Blackwells). They lived together until her death in the 1990s. She was the most important person in his life, and he felt bound to write about her – both in homage and from love. She comes across as a shy but strong woman, very sympathetic. The book is moving and intense."
--From the review by Johnny de Falbe at
John Sandoe in London, where it is available.
On Trust: Art and the Temptations of Suspicion
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999
A discussion of whether it is possible to create art today with the freedom of earlier ages and yet produce works that are more than merely decorative or commercial. The author argues that art is always made out of a deep confidence of being the world, and therefore in time and language.
Hardcover edition
ISBN: 0300079915
available from Barnes & Noble US
possibly available by special order from Amazon UK
Review by Stephen Mitchelmore
Touch
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996
Asking how it is possible to feel at home in the world, given that the world is independent of and indifferent to our wishes, this text draws on books, films and cultural history to argue that we can feel comfortable in the world and in relationships with others only if we value touch over sight.
Hardcover edition ISBN: 0300066902
available from Barnes & Noble US
possibly from Amazon UK
Text and Voice
Manchester, Carcanet Press, Ltd, 1992
"His wide-ranging opening essay shows how Protestant misreadings of scripture after Luther stem from a view of the Bible as a text to be deciphered rather than an invitation to participate in a communal activity. This theme is taken up in the title essay, where Keats' remark that he never understood Homer till 'I heard Chapman speak out loud and clear' is contrasted with the emphasis of theorists like Ricardou and Derrida on the work as (silent) text. In a full-scale attack on structuralism and the wilder aspects of deconstruction, Josipovici shows how such an approach suits the academy, denying the existential impact of art that asks us to listen and respond rather than dominate and control.
"These concerns illuminate essays on Dante, Wordsworth, Proust, Beckett, and Perec, and on the critics Maurice Blanchot and Roland Barthes. The book concludes with the acclaimed Northcliffe Lectures, 'Writing and the Body' which present a concerted argument about the place of the body in writing and reading, developing the thesis through suggestive analyses of Sterne, Shakespeare, and Kafka." -- from the dust jacket
Josipovici introduces this volume by asking why artists’ profoundest criticism can often be found in their letters and incidental remarks. We might add: "and their reviews."
The
Book of God: A Response to the Bible
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988
Is the Bible one
book or a collection of writings? If it is a book, what kind of book is
it and 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 fascinating questions in this beautifully
written book, which constitutes a rethinking of the nature of the Bible
and our relation to it.
Referring to the Hebrew, Greek and English
texts of the Old and New Testaments, Gabriel Josipovici begins by examining
the different conceptions of unity that underlie the Hebrew and Christian
scriptures, and then analyses what he sees as the Bible's three defining
characteristics: its rhythm, its attitude to speech, and its conception
of character. He also discusses the role of memory and genealogy in the
Hebrew scriptures, St Paul's conception of human character, and the different
responses of Kierkegaard and Thomas Mann to the stories of Genesis. The
volume includes a bibliography, and indexes of names and of Biblical passages.
Hardcover edition ISBN: 0300043201
available from Barnes
& Noble US
Softcover edition ISBN: 0300048653
available from Barnes
& Noble US
The Mirror of Criticism: Selected Reviews 1977-1982
Brighton & Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1983
out of print
This is a selection of reviews for various publications: the New York Review of Books, the Sunday Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the Jewish Quarterly among others. The subjects are Dante, Chaucer, Meyer Schapiro, Rabelais, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Bruno Schulz, Nabokov, W.H. Auden, Graham Greene, Borges, Beckett, Donald Davie, Bernard Malamud, Robbe-Grillet, Saul Bellow, Günter Grass, Picasso and Hebrew poetry, plus a conclusion strongly defending the author’s own artistic practise.
Brighton & Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1981
out of print
A concerted argument about the place of the body in writing and reading, developing the thesis through suggestive analyses of Sterne, Shakespeare, and Kafka, is presented in what was originally a series of four lectures; reprinted in Text and Voice, below.
Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1977
out of print
"What are the relations between a man's life and his art? What is the place of modern art, with its underlying principles of fragmentation, dislocation and parody, in the culture and education of today? What are the limits of human expression and of the expressivity of voice and body? These are some of the questions raised by Gabriel Josipovici in this collection of essays."
Hardcover edition ISBN: 0333440943
available from Barnes & Noble US
Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1971, 2nd edition 1979, 3rd edition 1994
out of print
The first collection of non-fiction began, he says, as an undergraduate at Oxford, but developed over his first ten years as a teacher. It has 12 essays, five on general themes, five on individual writers -- Proust, Chaucer, Rabelais, Hawthorne, William Golding -- and two on specific novels, Nabokov's Lolita and Bellow's Herzog. Together these essays demonstrate Josipovici's continuing concern with the art of the Middle Ages and its connections with Modernism.
Editing and commentary
Novels
Story and other collections
Theatre
Editing & commentary
Non-fiction
Books about GJ
The Portable Saul Bellow
Critical Introduction by Gabriel Josipovici
New York, The Viking Press, 1974
London, Open Books, 1975
Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch
Brighton & Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1982
London, Everyman's Library, 1993
London, Penguin Syrens pocket edition, 1994
London, Everyman's Library, 1997
Books about Gabriel Josipovici
Novels
Story and other collections
Theatre
Editing & commentary
Non-fiction
Books about GJ
Monika Fludernik, Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici’s
Creative Oeuvre
Frankfurt & New York, Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2000
The first monograph on Gabriel Josipovici gives close readings of a
selection of short stories, novels, plays and radio plays and a placing
of Gabriel Josipovici on the map of present-day British literature.
Softcover
edition ISBN 3631362757
available
from the publisher
Review by William Baker, Northern
Illinois University