The Cemetery in Barnes
Carcanet Press March 2018

The Cemetery in Barnes is a short, intense novel that opens in elegiac mode, advances quietly towards something dark and disturbing, before ending with an eerie calm. Its three plots, relationships and time-scales are tightly woven into a single story; three voices – as in an opera by Monteverdi – provide the soundtrack, enhanced by a chorus of friends and acquaintances. The main voice is that of a translator who moves from London to Paris and then to Wales, the setting for an unexpected conflagration. The ending at once confirms and suspends the reader’s darkest intuitions.

Hotel Andromeda
Carcanet Press June 2014

Hotel Andromeda takes its title from a work by the eccentric American artist Joseph Cornell, whose glass-lidded wooden boxes filled with odd detritus frequently bear the names of provincial nineteenth-century European hotels. Helena, a young writer, is obsessed with Cornell’s work. Its sense of loss frequently echoes that in her own life, especially with regard to her uncommunicative sister, who lives in Chechnya. For Helena, the horrors of war in that strife-plagued country are somehow dimly echoed in Cornell’s moonstruck artefacts. By the end, Cornell has somehow taught her to recreate him ‘with all his maddening foibles, but also his quality as a visionary, an ambiguous visionary, the only kind tolerable in our modern world’. Gabriel Josipovici transforms Helena’s quest into a full-fledged drama, replete with romance and surprises.

"The piano is not an instrument for young ladies Massimo, he said, it is an instrument for gorillas. Only a gorilla has the strength to attack the piano as it should be attacked, only a gorilla has the uninhibited energy to challenge the piano as it should be challenged."

Thus Tancredo Pavone,the wealthy and eccentric Sicilian nobleman and avant-garde composer, as recounted by his former manservant in the course of the single extensive interview which is this book. But as Massimo recalls what his master told him about his colourful life in Monte Carlo in the twenties, in Vienna studying with a pupil of Schoenberg's in the thirties, in post-war Paris and in Nepal where he underwent the revelation which fuelled his later music, and repeats Pavone’s often outrageous opinions about everything under the sun, from the current state of civilisation to the inner life of each note, from why beautiful women are always unhappy to the vanity of his fellow composers, it becomes clear that not only does Pavone not always distinguish between memory and fantasy, but that Massimo does not always understand what it is he is repeating. Yet what ultimately emerges is the picture of a moving relationship between two people from very different walks of life, and, above all, the fact that behind Pavone's outrageousness and eccentricity lies a wounded and vulnerable man of profound integrity, for whom living and making music were always one.

Two Novels:
After andMaking Mistakes
Carcanet Press Ltd. 2009
There's a woman pursuing me, Alan says. I knew her ages ago in the States... She says she's come to find me.
- Why?
- I don't know... The only thing I know is that I'm afraid of her.

After is haunted by a traumatic memory. A woman re-enters the life of a man after fifteen years - for vengeance? for reconciliation? Or is her return only imagined? Gabriel Josipovici's taut novel draws the reader deep into a relationship, the volatile mix of guilt, memory and desire. Tension builds to a violent climax that shatters illusion.

Making Mistakes explores the ironies of relationships more playfully. In a reworking of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, two couples change partners - and change again - with the connivance of a modern Don Alfonso and his Despina. The cost to the couples of discovering their true desires is high; as in Mozart, things end happily (at least for the moment). The lovers learn that one does not make mistakes, one makes choices.

Both novels reveal Josipovici's celebrated wit and precision, character and narrative revealed through dialogue. Through tense eroticism and sparkling comedy, each explores complexities of twenty-first-century life.

Everything Passes
Carcanet Press Ltd. 2006
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

Goldberg: Variations
Carcanet Press Ltd. 2002
     "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

REVIEW BY STEPHEN MITCHELMORE

Now
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

German editions available from Amazon DE

Moo Pak
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.

Hardcover ISBN: 1857540905
available from Barnes & Noble US

Softcover ISBN: 1857542878
available from Barnes & Noble US

Heart's Wings
Carcanet Press
2010

There are no objects any more. There were never any objects. Now you know. Don't look for me. By the time you read this I will be far away. You will never find me.

Gabriel Josipovici's stories play hide and seek with the reader. Whether they take place in a seedy London nightclub in the sixties, in a brothel in Hamburg during the First World War, in the fevered world of Shakespeare's mind as he writes Twelfth Night or in that of the dying Borges as he dreams of Finland and the Kalevala , in an airport outside Berlin, in Bukovina in 1942... one thing is certain: you are never quite where you think you are and what is happening is never quite what you think is happening. No matter how short the story – and many are no more than two or three pages long – by the time you have finished reading you will have travelled an unimaginable distance, and will never be quite the same again. Heart's Wings gathers 23 stories written over the last 40 years.

The Teller and the Tale
Carcanet Press
October 2016

"We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes," writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale.  The book draws on a quarter of a century’s worth of critical reflection on modern art and literature, Biblical culture, Jewish theology, European identity, the nature of beginnings, and the bittersweetness of writing fiction – to name but a few of the subjects upon which Josipovici’s ranging, pansophic attention rests.  The author describes paths between these distant regions of space and time with characteristic warmth and ingenuity.  Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Pasternak, Eliot, Spark, Valéry, and Beckett dwell here alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cervantes, and the Brothers Grimm.  Each of these great writers is a point of departure for personal reflection, and a series of critical essays takes on a second life as a book of intimate recollections and fond remembrances, recalling departed friends and peers, evoking the pain and ecstasy of childhood, the personal struggle to be a writer, and the life-long project of becoming a person.  Here is a snapshot of influences on one of the English language’s most distinctive voices, and an opinionated, sensual, and informed exposition on Western literature and culture.
 

Hamlet: Fold on Fold
Yale University Press
March 2016

William Shakespeare's Hamlet is probably the best-known and most commented upon work of literature in Western culture.  The paradox is that it is at once utterly familiar and strangely elusive—very like our own selves, argues Gabriel Josipovici in this stimulating and original study.  Moreover, our desire to master this elusiveness, to “pluck the heart out of its mystery,” as Hamlet himself says, precisely mirrors what is going on in the play; and what Shakespeare's play demonstrates is that to conceive human character (and works of art) in this way is profoundly misguided.
 
Rather than rushing to conclusions or setting out a theory of what Hamlet is “about,” therefore, we should read and watch patiently and openly, allowing the play to unfold before us in its own time and trying to see each moment in the context of the whole.  Josipovici’s valuable book is thus an exercise in analysis which puts the physical experience of watching and reading at the heart of the critical process—at once a practical introduction to a great and much-loved play and a sophisticated intervention in some of the key questions of theory and aesthetics of our time.

“His first book on Shakespeare and it is typically original… Josipovici is such a great critic because he has a nose for the big questions and for what doesn’t work as an answer.  Best of all, he reads carefully and asks the right questions.”  – David Herman, Jewish Chronicle

“Full of resonant and evaluative comparisons… Josipovici’s historicism, like that of T.S.  Eliot whom he he quotes often, is broad-brush and confident… a careful character-based plot summary, the book does give moments of real insight.” – Bart Vanes, TLS

What Ever Happened to Modernism?
Yale University Press
September 2010

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 or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 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, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.

Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing, and writing about other writers. What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a strident call to arms, and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.

The Book of God: A Response to the Bible
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.

The Mirror of Criticism:
Selected Reviews 1977-1982
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.