Gabriel Josipovici

I once met a woman who had uprooted herself from life in America to come and work in Poland because she had seen the orange-tiled roofs of Prague and felt that she had lived there before, in another life; an impossibility in a rational world but still justification to change everything she was doing. Why am I saying this? Because it feels like the story at the heart of 'In a Hotel Garden' makes perfect sense to me, and I think it made perfect sense both to Liliane and to Rick, though not to show more Ben and certainly not to Francesca because they are looking for rational explanations, and because they believe that life is explicable. It isn't, and the charm and the value in this novella surely comes from that conflict and how it resolves. show less

Sometimes he made me stop and would get out …and stand at the edge of a field to listen to the cicadas. They were singing well before mankind came on the scene, he said, and they will go on singing long after we have all passed away.

I kept wondering what this was all about, this book that made endless references to sounds and music and depth of sound and pointing always to something in a distance that I cannot hear or see while I read it. How do you read a book about music without hearing show more the sounds? You can’t. So it is not then about music, but an account of someone passing through this world. Though the music is there pointed at by the looping conversation that refers to itself over and over, like a few bars and notes repeating themselves in a musical score.

There is nothing more ridiculous, Massimo, than setting a text to music.

It could all just be an experiment in narrative style, as a compacted narrative of a life. A Sicilian nobleman talking to his employee, a fellow called Massimo, who in turn relates as much as he could remember to a nameless narrator who asked that he "go on" once in a while or a few questions here and there. Massimo, though a simple fellow is the driver, caretaker and valet to this Pavone fellow, and he has a prodigious memory. He can forget and then recount endless streams of the narrative as though he relives it. Like a chant, never forgotten, endless and repeated. At one point, Pavone tells Massimo that chants simply exist in the universe and they are not so much uttered as tapped into. They never pass, they are always there. Nepalese monks simply train to tune into them.

Of course infinity is a loop, symbolised by the figure like an eight on its side, it comes back in on itself, as do recollections.

Existence is perhaps this, too, a moment experienced within the infinite.

It's interesting how this book is voiced. Massimo expresses Pavone's voice. Like an instrument playing the composer's notes. Massimo seems to get the voice right, an arrogant, self-important aristocrat. Some instruments are lyrical, they have a voice, say the clarinet for example. show less

In 1958 Gabriel Josipovici attends an Oxford lecture on contemporary English literature and subsequently reads those key authors the lecturer notes, including Anthony Powell and Iris Murdoch. He is most disappointed. He writes, “They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust.” Gabriel Josipovici ponders why this is the show more case.

He attends another lecture where a British scholar debunks and rails against Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Baudelaire and Sartre. The speaker tells the audience in so many words, “These effete ninnies were all suffering from oversensitivity mingled with self-regard; what they had to say was the result of their cosseted upbringing and a sharp kick up the backside was all that was needed to bring them to their senses.” Josipovici takes exception, thinking such influential European writers offer deep insight into our modern human condition. Repeat experiences with hard-line, no-nonsense Anglo speakers and the everyday realism of English and US authors propels Josipovici to probe deeper into the very roots of Modernism.

In approaching the question ‘When does Modernism begin?’ the author details quite a bit of history of literature and the arts and proposes we reach much farther back in time then the 1850-1950 timetable usually given in answer to this question. For, as he writes, “The temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it.”

However, as he goes on - and this is key to his entire book: “The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and, therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way, as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen in this way, Modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that ‘disenchantment of the world’ to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.”

To undergird his position, Josipovici spends the lion’s share of his book providing detailed examples, from Albrecht Durer to Cervantes and Rabelais, from Casper David Friedrich and Pablo Picasso to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka to show how since the 1500s religion took an inward turn and the world became a progressively colder place. At one point we read, “It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted.” He then quotes Walter Benjamin: “The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual.” And that’s solitary individual not only in terms of the writer of the novel but also in terms of the novel being read by a solitary reader. Indeed, an entire culture of men and women, including artist, musicians and writers living, working and creating in a kind of solitary confinement – the modern world as a very alone place with no comforting communal anchors.

Again, quite a detailed and well researched book. The above quotes along with my comments are merely a taste. Since I am not a historian or literary scholar I will not offer my own judgement on Gabriel Jasipovici’s position here; rather, I urge you to read for yourself. However, there is one important point I will note: other than Jorge Luis Borges and a passing mention of V. S. Naipaul, Jasipovici’s observations are restricted to European and American literature, art and music. There are no references to authors or artists or musicians from Latin America or Africa or the Middle East or Japan or elsewhere on the globe. Since this book was published in 2010 I can’t help thinking the author’s Eurocentric approach is a bit provincial, or, in other words, I would suggest one possible answer to the question “What Ever Happened to Modernism?” could be that it has gone global. We are now one World Culture and any complete history of literature and the arts requires a truly world view, a view that would be well to include one of the great literary artists of the late 20th century, the author in the photo below – G. Cabrera Infante. show less

This short book tells a story without a plot, and yet it entices. Josipovici’s storytelling style is not spectacular; he uses an almost careless, gently rippling tone, and many repetitive elements, but offering a richness that arises from an ingenious play of appearance and reality.
The unnamed narrator is a professional translator, a seemingly phlegmatic man with no remarkable personality, but one obsessed with the tragic verses of Monteverdi's Orfeo and the languorous poetry of Joachim du show more Bellay. He has settled into a sluggish bourgeois existence, with a lot of attention for the good things in life, but clearly also on the verge of depression or even over it. He is still obsessed with his late first wife, who was everything to him, but who he constantly shadowed when she returned from work and who he did not try to save when she fell into the Thames. And the marriage to his second wife seems perfectly harmonious, but their seemingly polite bickering reveals a yawning chasm between the two.
In other words, Josipovici presents an intriguing game of contradictions, in which he regularly casts doubt on the truthfulness of the above-mentioned elements and refers to the possibility of imaginary lives. He reinforces this by constantly jumping through time and place. Almost imperceptibly, we pass from the protagonist's life with his second wife in a farmhouse in Wales, to his first marriage and residence in London, to his lonely existence in Paris after the death of his first wife. This play with time and place constantly unbalances the reader. On top of that the author regularly repeats the same events and actions, but each time with small variations and an occasional sinister accent, in which death constantly comes into play. Also the male protagonist himself, almost carelessly, introduces these small variations in his story, by regularly repeating the original texts of Monteverdi and du Bellay, but each time translating them slightly differently, shifting the meaning of the verses. In this way, Josipovici seems to ingeniously link modernism and postmodernism, confusing his reader, while at the same time addressing a very rich palette of existential themes. It was my first acquaintance with this author, but it certainly won't be my last. show less