Search Results

“... and betrayal. But Brookner contrives to spin out her matter, creating effects of wispy fineness. Gabriel Josipovici is one of the élite corps of British novelists who write theoretical criticism and novels, turn and turn about. Above all others, these writers know what they are doing. Whether the reader can keep up with their movements between the ...”

“... mightily not to produce his own sentimental elegy. This is the theme, and the struggle, of Gabriel Josipovici’s brilliantly suggestive new book. Josipovici would call the simple and the sentimental ‘trust’ and ‘suspicion’, or perhaps innocence and irony, but his language, and his envy of the ...”

“... exogamous passion. Enright’s reviews are more conspicuously abroad thoughts from home than Josipovici’s or Heller’s, and ‘the British reader’, named or implied, is often summoned up and flattered as a necessary moderating agency in a world where foreign (and in particular German) writers have a seemingly innate tendency to fret their brains ...”

“... to report, immeasurably more honest: the other two collaborators have each contributed a chapter. Josipovici’s is ‘Some thoughts on the libretto’, which arrive at the shattering conclusion that The Rake ‘is the piano tuner’s answer to the train driver’, whatever that may mean: Stravinsky’s brothers ‘used to call him “the piano ...”

“... a form which is apt to suffer from under-nourishment. On the analogy of the nouveau roman Gabriel Josipovici’s Contre-Jour should be classed as a nouvelle nouvelle, for he still owes allegiance to that venerable tradition. Were the cats and the dog put down before or after the mother’s death? We are told both. Why, when the central theme is ...”

“... no one would invoke the adjective. Some dedicated verbal warriors continued. Anthony Burgess, Gabriel Josipovici and Eva Figes keep at it. Some, notably Rosalind Belben, have even joined them. But most, like Robert Nye and David Plante, have expanded their canvases. The Johnsonian experimental novel has been more or less buried, just as the Little ...”

“... Sticks of bone and sinew poking into hairy holes.’ One grits one’s teeth expecting pages of Gabriel Josipovici or Martin Amis-style prose of defamiliarisation. But, gratefully, the narrative promptly exfoliates into a series of hard and sequential plot lines. Intercut scenes to his deserted wife and house reveal that the traveller is John, an ...”

“... and Deconstruction. The writers are Laurence Lerner, Cedric Watts, Roger Scruton, John Holloway, Gabriel Josipovici, Wayne Booth, Robert Pattison and Anthony Thorlby. Four of them teach at Sussex, so I suppose the book started as a bright idea in the Senior Common Room at Falmer. Some of the essays are genial performances. ...”

“... date, there has only been this desultory attention which includes a notably foolish review by Gabriel Josipovici in which he states that he would happily trade ‘the whole of that impeccable philo-semite, Joyce (the darling of the politically correct), for just that one Sweeney poem of Eliot’s’. This type of insidious put-down is hardly new, and ...”