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All blog entries tagged with 'gabriel josipovici'
Monday 22 March 2010
Jeff Bursey reviews Josipovici
Jeff Bursey's review of Gabriel Josipovici’s two short novels, After & Making Mistakes, just went up on The Quarterly Conversation:
Like Beckett’s plays, Gabriel Josipovici’s works fend off resolution; also, his texts have more white space than is found in most novels (mainstream or not), and there’s a great use of dialogue. Great, as in its great compactness, naturalness, and poetry — but also as in a lot. There are few narrative passages in the recent novels Goldberg: Variations (2002) and Everything Passes (2006). The space around the words emphasizes that each line counts, and allows each line to breathe on its own. They have, so to say, sentience. The lulls and repetitions of Josipovici’s prose give readers the opportunity to see how his characters come across while they think, feel, talk, repress, obfuscate, and go about their business (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, gabriel josipovici
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Thursday 18 February 2010
Minghella's stage adaptation of Josipovici's "Mobius the Stripper"
Via the BBC:
It is a year since the death of Anthony Minghella [well, he died in March 2008, so this has been on the BBC site for a wee while] had shocked and saddened those close to him as well as his fans.
Before his celebrated career in film winning awards for The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, the producer and director studied at the University of Hull and then became a lecturer at its drama department.
It was here that he produced his first piece of work, a musical stage adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper, which had broadcast on BBC Radio Humberside in 1976 (more...)
Happily, the BBC provide some audio extracts: Extract 1 from Mobius the Stripper; Extract 2 from Mobius the Stripper.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici, theatre
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Friday 05 February 2010
Josipovici's 'Everything Passes'
In a fleeting fit of energy midway through last year, I proposed to some fellow bloggers that a symposium, hosted here at RSB, on Gabriel Josipovici's superb novella Everything Passes would be a jolly good thing. Well, as I've discussed (in my recent Hamlet and Lear pieces) it quickly became obvious to me that, last year, I didn't have the energy to organise anything. So, I owe a sincere apology to those friends who wrote some wonderful pieces (which will soon see the light of day here on the site -- hopefully, next week) expecting the symposium to go ahead.
Happily, several bloggers have posted the would-be symposium pieces on their own sites. Richard Crary, Dan Visel, Steve Mitchelmore and now Waggish have all written pieces that expand upon the review Paul Griffiths wrote for me a couple of years back.
Please do read these excellent contributions, and then I'll have a few more up for you here on RSB next week.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, gabriel josipovici
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Thursday 10 September 2009
Review of new Josipovici
The Jewish Chronicle offers the first review of After & Making Mistakes, Gabriel Josipovici's two new novels in one (very handsome) volume (via This Space):
Dissatisfaction is a peculiarly middle-class indulgence. A life that from the outside appears perfect — moderate success, sufficient income, a loving family — can from feel from within claustrophobic and merely adequate, plagued by thoughts of the successes unachieved, the ones that got away, and a nagging lack of purpose.
Gabriel Josipovici’s two new novellas — each barely over 130 pages and issued together under one, elegant cover — both deal with this quiet despair of the bourgeoisie (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, book review, gabriel josipovici
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Wednesday 18 March 2009
Thoughts on Stephen Crane
Gabriel Josipovici enthusiastically mentioned reading Stephen Crane in last year's Books of the Year symposium here at ReadySteadyBook: "what a great writer he was! Not just The Red Badge, which is indeed one of the great books about war, up there with The Iliad and War and Peace, even though it is less than a hundred and fifty pages long, but also such short stories as The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel. In fact everything he touched he turned to gold."
Where Gabriel goes we follow; and Richard is already on the trail:
I was struck by the fact that Crane was born November 1, 1871. That is, four months after Marcel Proust (born July 10, 1871). Younger than Proust! In my mind, where Proust feels present, his concerns relevant, Crane has always seemed locked in the dusty past -- not only were some of his writings required reading in grade school, but the subject of his most famous novel, The Red Badge of Courage, is the Civil War. His association with this war is so complete, I think, that it has only served to reinforce the sense I had of him belonging to a much earlier period than he does. In truth, of course, Crane's realism was innovative in its time, and I can see now that it stands as a precursor to the writing of some of the historical Modernists, Hemingway in particular (more...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere, gabriel josipovici
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Saturday 07 March 2009
Josipovici interview
Tamar Yellin interviews Gabriel Josipovici in The Forward:
There is still hope for the novel. In a climate increasingly hostile to fiction that does not adhere to the conservative parameters set by the publishing industry, some writers continue to work according to their own lights. Gabriel Josipovici is remarkable for producing novels that belong to the modern European tradition of Kafka and Proust, yet he writes not in German or French, but in English — and, more remarkably still, out of an English setting.
Perhaps it is this, too, that has helped alienate him from the English realist tradition. “I take very little pleasure from the great 19th-century novels, especially the English and French varieties,” Josipovici told the Forward. I like fiction that is not anecdotal, but not whimsical or surrealist, either. I love Borges, but I also love Muriel Spark; I love Marguerite Duras when she hits it off, but I also love Thomas Bernhard and his crazy excesses. But I don’t see these as being different in kind from the poets I love — Yeats and Stevens and Eliot — and some of Auden and some of Celan. Or perhaps they are different in kind, but when I read them I simply feel — with all of them: Yes, this is it!” (More...)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici
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Wednesday 04 March 2009
New novels from Josipovici
Via This Space:
Three years after the sublime Everything Passes, Carcanet has announced new fiction from Gabriel Josipovici -- "without doubt our most important writer" (Lee Rourke). August will see the publication of After & Making Mistakes; two novels in a single volume.
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?". Making Mistakes on the other hand "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."
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici
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Monday 01 December 2008
A Time to Speak Out -- Josipovici essay
One of my Books of the Week this week is A Time to Speak Out "a collection of strong Jewish voices, drawing on an established tradition of Jewish dissidence, come together to explore some of the most challenging issues facing diaspora Jews, notably in relation to the ongoing conflict in Israel-Palestine."
Thanks to the good folk at Verso (thanks Rowan!) we have a PDF version of Gabriel Josipovici's contribution to A Time to Speak Out, Cousins, up on RSB for you to enjoy. Go read!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici, rsb
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Tuesday 30 September 2008
JC.com archive
The Jewish Chronicle online seems to have opened up its articles' archive. Search for Josipovici, for instance, and you get a whole pile of priceless reviews from the man himself. Go play!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici, internet
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Tuesday 19 August 2008
Josipovici on Hammershoi
Just spotted this from last week's TLS but no link I'm afraid. Seeing as I've dissed Bolano, who Mark's a fan of, I should mention that one of his favourite writers, Gabriel Josipovici is writing on the incredible Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, currently being exhibited at the Royal Academy
Posted by Rowan Wilson
Tags: art, gabriel josipovici
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Tuesday 22 April 2008
Josipovici's Top Ten Novellas
Earlier, I mentioned my Editor's Corner Tuesday Top Ten feature (today featuring Two Ravens Press publisher Sharon Blackie). Well, I'm going to go ahead and steal my own idea (hardly original, for sure) and have a Tuesday Top Ten here on ReadySteadyBook ...
Below is a list -- how exciting is this! -- of Gabriel Josipovici's "top ten novellas – or short novels, or long short stories – books of about 100 pages that ask to be read in one go. I give the English title of standard translations for all except the Perec, which, so far as I know, has not been translated:"
- Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
- Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas
- Stifter, Ice Mountain (often translated as Rock Crystal)
- Melville, Bartleby
- Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilitch
- James, The Turn of the Screw
- Mann, Death in Venice
- Kafka, Metamorphosis
- Pinget, Passacaglia
- Perec, Un Cabinet d’Amateur
Anyone have a copy of Adalbert Stifter's Ice Mountain they want to swap for ... a pile of new books? I can't find a copy anywhere! Actually, I do have a copy (of the Pushkin Press version): I best read it!
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: gabriel josipovici, rsb, the book depository
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Thursday 29 November 2007
Modernism remains a challenge
In this week's TLS there is an abridged version Gabriel Josipovici's lecture What Ever Happened to Modernism? (which I heard Gabriel give in London, back in March, as did Stephen Mitchelmore and Ellis Sharp).
The lecture, and now the essay (which I'm afraid isn't online), made me think again about Establishment Literary Fiction (ELF). It isn't that ELF is bad. Some ELF is good. And certainly much of it is very good indeed at being ELF! But since Modernism, and again since Modernism's questions were re-articulated by the writers of the nouveau roman — especially, then, for those who see the novel as a mode of enquiry or, better, a mode of discovery — ELF seems to me to be the embodiment of Bad Faith. It manifests a willing refusal to acknowledge that the questions that Modernism posed even exist (or that the novel might be a place to inquire about their answers).
Therefore, ELF endlessly repeats the tropes and styles of the Victorian Novel, with its fingers in its ears, shouting its (sometimes very good) narrative, flaunting its (sometimes very finely drawn) characters, refusing to be interrogated and refusing to recognise its own structural ressentiment.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: establishment_lit_fiction, gabriel josipovici
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Wednesday 14 November 2007
More on Josipovici
I should have mentioned this a wee while ago (apologies to Richard that I didn't): some great stuff over on The Existence Machine about Gabriel Josipovici, including thoughtful posts on The Book of God and Goldberg: Variations.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, gabriel josipovici
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Monday 12 November 2007
On Everything Passes
Tales from the Reading Room on Gabriel Josipovici's stunning récit Everything Passes:
I began to read the first few words and felt myself slipping, slipping, as if down a polished chute, those aching blank spaces dragging me across to the next portion of dialogue as if across a dangerous precipice. I had to put it down for a while because it frightened me. And for the same reason I had to pick it up again. When it was finished, I was stunned. It was quite the most extraordinary piece of writing I had encountered in a long time.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, gabriel josipovici
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