Gabriel
Josipovici has been working in the minimalist modernist mode
(minimomode?) since the late 1960s, producing over five decades a
stream of short novels where the narrative position is continually
being skewed, time, place, and even character are equally
untrustworthy, and the story seemingly falls into the interstices
between everyday conversation and trivial dramas. In a
Hotel Garden and Conversations in Another Room flaunt
Josipovici’s use of the novel-of-dialogue technique, caulked with
assisting prose whenever required, exploring alongside writers like
Manuel Puig and Ariel Dorfman this Barthesian notion in the 1980s,
punching against the intrusive narrator and allowing the reader to
‘construct’ the novel alongside the writer—a technique that
makes for ‘pageturning’ works that spit on real ‘pagetuners’
that lard their pages with boring description and nonsense learned in
writing classes. Contre-Jour is a sneaky novel that makes
tremendous use of the (usually tired) technique of a second-person
address to an unnamed listener. The speakers and addressees are
unnamed apart from mother, daughter, father, and the subtitle A
Triptych After Pierre Bonnard clues the reader in to the
sleights-of-hand at play. Josipovici’s
style evolved into the ‘90s with the atypical breakless ramble Moo
Pak, presented in the form of a
literary essay or dérive,
drifting from philosophy to peevish contemporary commentary to longer
musings on the late life of Jonathan Swift, and Proust, encompassing
a breathtaking range of literary history. More recent works include
Everything Passes: a
short prose work that is a curious and haunting rumination on loss,
the passing of time, the abandonment of family, and people who like
to write Rabelais criticism. Making use of strangely effective
repetitions, blank space, conspicuous absence of invading overarching
narrator, tagless dialogue, the novel is richer upon re-reading. Only
Joking is a novel (almost) all
in dialogue, a fast-moving noir-of-sorts, comedy-of-sorts,
thriller-of-sorts, and sort-of-sorts. Similar in tone to Gilbert
Adair’s A Closed Book,
another cunning (almost) all-in-dialogue novel, this one concerns a
cast of characters whose relations to one another and place in the
plot is only learned as the novel progresses, creating intrigue and
setting up a world from what is omitted. This brings us to The
Present: three characters
inhabiting fluctuating realities in the same London flat. As the
blurb outlines, the novel aims to explore “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,” which sums up the
effect of this short novel perfectly. Each novel from Josipovici is
an intelligent and original tussle with the form, and mixes seeming
simplicity with re-readable complexity, producing works that engage
at the superficial and theoretical levels, a rare feat for an
experimental novelist. About ten novels from Josipovici remain out of
print—an omnibus is desperately needed to keep this vital and
prolific author in our purviews.
Editions:
Hardback,
Gollancz, 1975.
Bibliography:
Novels:
The Inventory,
Michael Joseph, 1968
Words,
Gollancz, 1971.
The Present,
Gollancz, 1975.
Migrations,
Harvester Press, 1977.
The Echo
Chamber, Harvester Press, 1980
The Air We
Breathe, Harvester Press, 1981
Conversations
in Another Room, Methuen, 1984
Contre-Jour: A
Triptych After Pierre Bonnard,
Carcanet Press, 1986
The Big Glass,
Carcanet Press, 1991
In a Hotel
Garden, Carcanet Press, 1993
Moo Pak,
Carcanet Press, 1994
Now,
Carcanet Press, 1998
Goldberg:
Variations, Carcanet Press, 2002
Everything
Passes, Carcanet Press, 2006
After and
Making Mistakes, Carcanet Press, 2009
Only Joking,
CB Editions, 2010
Infinity,
Carcanet Press, 2012
Hotel
Andromeda, Carcanet
Press, 2014
Short fiction:
Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays, Gollancz, 1974
Four Stories, Menard Press, 1977
In the Fertile Land, Carcanet Press, 1987
Steps:
Selected Fiction and Drama,
Carcanet Press, 1990
Heart's Wings
& Other Stories, Carcanet
Press, 2010
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