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Below is an unused review of Gabriel Josipovici's two 'novellas' After and Making Mistakes that was never taken up and I'd almost forgotten having written.

I'm not sure it quite ever fully opens up, but it does the beginning of a job, I think:

To be human is to be amongst those who thoughts we don't we know; to be in the dark. Perhaps this condition is the source of our urge to speak. Language, born of absence, filling a lack, generating light. To be human is to be alone, and also to know that we are in thrall to thoughts we call our own, yet are barely aware of. Perhaps this very unknowingness is the source of writing. Writing from out of a void, to fill a void. Both speaking and writing, then, veil ignorance of ourselves and of others even as they display it, even as they ameliorate it.

There is an element of Bad Faith to the traditional novel. This gloriously humanistic art-form is peopled with voluble, intelligible puppets, but the novelist's urge to get inside his or her characters in order to make those characters "fully-rounded" – the oddest beacon of a novel's success and one that has become a fetish for most reviewers – is the one thing that should give us pause. By colonising a character's thoughts a novelist, finally, confirms that they are only characters and subverts the entire project. Realism collapses in the face of what we've been told to think of as realistic characters. This is why a novelist like Dickens can be simultaneously so sympathetic – the humanist urge is palpably there – and so sentimental. Certain books in the Modernist tradition (from Joyce to Kafka and beyond) whilst accused of being cold (lacking in 'humanity') or austere or overly-intellectual have every right to complain that their radical humanism (their concern with writing itself, their awareness of their potential for solipsism, their ability to see and respect both the Self and the Other as finally unknowable) has been ignored because it doesn't display itself as mawkishly as the character-stocked mainstream.

Gabriel Josipovici is a writer firmly in the modernist tradition. As a critic he has taught that modernism is not merely an aberration (or exultation) in the arts that arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but rather a thread (a threat?) that runs from the most exuberant early novelists (Sterne, Rabelais, Cervantes) through the Victorian novel where it was rather submerged and flowered again, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, in the period of (official) Modernism. But modernism remains a challenge, an embarrassment to the (post-)Victorian novel, a question posed against its unacknowledged assumptions. The work of Beckett is vital here. From the fifties, a singular body of work appeared that made much of the rest of American and European Letters look flaccid and insincere.

It is facile to suggest we should judge Josipovici’s critical work by how well he writes himself. Nonetheless it is fascinating to see how such an important critic (whose recent What Ever Happened to Modernism? has gained a good degree of notoriety) goes about the real work of writing fiction, and whether or not his own fiction could withstand a dose of Josipovician critique.

In After, Alan Schneider finds himself ‘pursued’ by a woman from out of his past. Alan is married but, we’re led to believe, also has something of an eye for the ladies: we oversee him flirt, for example, at a party and on his way to see a grieving friend. Claude, however, is different, more than an earlier dalliance, more substantial and more threatening. Alan is unnerved by her reappearance, and by memories of the event that led him to leave her and Princeton where he worked, and return to London fifteen years before we meet him.

At a critical point in the narrative we learn casually: ‘And now it seem

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There are so few podcasts worth listening to – Entitled Opinions, In Our Time (unless it's on science), KCRW Bookworm – that is worth drumming out news of a fourth. Colin Marshall's Marketplace of Ideas has been going for a few years but came to my attention only recently when Gabriel Josipovici was interviewed about What Ever Happened to Modernism? If you know of any others of equal quality, please let me know.

So says Steve. And, please, if you do know any decent podcasts, let us know in our respective comment boxes!

Point of information: Jeff Bursey reviews Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? in the January/February issue of American Book Review. I hear that the review is 'positive' but, sadly, it is not online.

On the 9th April at 4pm (as part of the Free the Word Festival) Gabriel Josipovici, Geoff Dyer and Dubravka Ugresic will discuss "whether the novel must evolve once again to reawaken readers to the forces that are at work in society"...

The novel was once a surprising, disruptive genre that challenged familiar ways of seeing the world. Over three centuries of evolution, it has repeatedly reinvented itself in order to comprehend a changing society. But has it become stale and conventional? And has the novel’s process of renewal come to an end? Join Gabriel Josipovici, author of What Ever Happened to Modernism? essayist and novelist Geoff Dyer and Croatian writer and academic Dubravka Ugresic as they argue whether the novel must evolve once again to reawaken readers to the forces that are at work in society.

Chaired by Alex Clark.

Tickets: £8 (£5 PEN Members and Concessions), or £25 for full festival ticket. For more on the talk, visit the event's page over at freewordonline.com

Over at The Marketplace of Ideas...

Colin Marshall talks to Gabriel Josipovici, author of many novels and critical essays involved with the aesthetics and techniques of modernism. In his latest book, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, he traces modernism’s roots further back in history than perhaps any other scholar of modernism has done before. It’s all in the service of the titular question, which expresses a deep concern of anyone who enjoys modernist works today: how and why has the Western world so largely ignored the excitement and potential of modernist art, that is, art conscious of its own limits and responsibilities?

Ficton Uncovered invited me to contribute to their site. So I wrote about Gabriel Josipovici's fiction...

In the summer of this year (2010), a critic of some standing (and with over 25 books under his belt) suddenly seemed to cause a silly season media storm for saying in his latest book what he’d said in all his previous ones, and what he’d dedicated a lifetime to articulating. The academic in question is Gabriel Josipovici, the controversial book was What Ever Happened to Modernism?. In it, Josipovici argued that modernism wasn’t confined to the period of Official Modernism at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, that literary art always needs honestly to face modernism’s perennial questions, and that many of today’s most vaunted writers of literary fiction are woefully overrated. I couldn’t agree more strongly with Josipovici in his overall analysis. The media was less convinced. What it particularly seemed to find galling was that an “unknown” academic had the nerve to tell writers how they should write, and implicitly accuse literary journalists of not realising that their novel-writing emperors were inadvertently wandering around without any pants. What, they growled, did a dusty academic really know about fiction? (More...)

Finally! Stephen Mitchelmore gives Gabriel Josipovici's superb Whatever Happened to Modernism? the review it deserves:

The title of this book is a question asked by a professor of English and answered by a practising novelist. Apart from Milan Kundera, no other living writer has engaged with modern fiction with such depth of learning and lightness of touch. I have been reading Gabriel Josipovici's fiction and non-fiction for over twenty years but little prepared me for the sustained focus and force of this remarkable book. Until now his literary critical works have been collections of essays, even his book on the bible, The Book of God, is a series of discrete essays. Given this back catalogue which includes the lectures given at UCL and Oxford University, it's predicatable that the new book has been characterised by some as an academic treatise rather than an accessible essay in the classic sense. The deceit needs to be countered not only because it is wrong but because it also confirms Josipovici's verdict on English literary culture as "narrow, provincial and smug". This can be demonstrated by bitter and dishonest reactions, as well as some more respectful if condescending assessments (more...)

If ReadySteadyBook had not have been called ReadySteadyBook, then I might just as well have called it The Gabriel Josipovici Fan Club. I've been reading Josipovici since the early 90s, a time when my reading was mostly philosophical and political. When I launched ReadySteadyBook in 2003 -- a signal to myself that my reading was now primarily literary -- Josipovici attained key importance in my own personal pantheon, and ReadySteadyBook has regularly referred to (and been informed by) his work over the several intervening years. Aside from Stephen Mitchelmore's blog This Space, I don't think any other website has banged the drum for Josipovici as loudly. It is ironic, then, that over the summer, whilst ReadySteadyBook has been mostly off the air (due to it gettting a new 'engine' and my getting a time-consuming new job), Josipovici has attained a degree of notoriety for remarks made in his latest book What Ever Happened to Modernism? (and in a non-interview in the Guardian that came about because of it).

L'affaire Josipovici has crystallised a number of things in my mind about British literary culture, so this won't be the last time I refer to it as ReadySteadyBook comes alive again over the next weeks and months. Today, however, I just want to respond to Ian Jack's petty and undignified piece in the Guardian yesterday.

It's interesting that Josipovici's book which, in many ways, is both a call to read more carefully and an enquiry into why reading carefully is beyond so many cultural gatekeepers, has been read so sloppily by so many of its critics. Josipovici 's book is in no conceivable way an encomium for "experimentalism" as Ian Jack so astoundingly misreads it, nor is it a essay of high praise for High Modernism as others have assumed. Josipovici doesn't invoke marginal or avant-garde writers, nor praises typographical or narrative playfulness over stale traditionalism, but rather brings us back to canonical writers (a good part of his essay is taken up with Wordsworth) and allows us to see what was at stake for those artists in their work, and what is at stake for us as readers. The best reviews of the book (if I have the strength, I'll consider the worst reviews at another time), Sam Leith's grudging praise ("I enjoyed the sinuousness and vigour of Josipovici's arguments") or Tom McCarthy's measured and welcome warmth both make mistakes about this book even as they fail fully to come to terms with its arguments. Leith inexplicably reverses Josipovici's considered appraisal of Euripides; McCarthy (a friend, and a writer and critic of considerable skill) misattributes to Josipovici views he rightly criticises Adam Thirlwell and Julian Barnes for espousing; Ian Jack just writes a lot of nonsense about Gertrude Stein that suggests he hasn't read Josipovici properly (if at all) and that he most certainly wouldn't understand Stein if he got anywhere near her challenging work.

Josipovici's subtle, serious and very moving book is the only one I know that takes us beyond stale (and historicist) arguments about Form. It is the only book I know that gives us the tools to see how the experimentalism-lite of, say, Will Self, David Mitchell and Salman Rushdie is postmodernism's way of not responding to the perennial challenge of modernism (in the same way that much Victorian fiction didn't respond to Cervantes and Sterne; most Edwardian fiction didn't understand what Woolf was having to respond to in order to write as she did: let us not forget, most Edwardian readers were taking out, fr

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...)

Via the BBC: "It is a year since the death of Anthony Minghella 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...)

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.

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...)

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...)

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...)

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!

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!

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 Josipovoci is writing on the incredible Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi, currently being exhibited at the Royal Academy

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
• 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!

The newest Blooming Tree book will be coming out on April 1. April Fools seems like the perfect date to introduce the world to a kid who finds a yak in his bed. So, I would like to introduce you to Kay Pluta's There's a Yak in My Bed, our newest independent reader picture book.



Now, what would be a book release party without presents? I've been given 10 books by the boss, and I've decided to have a few contests to give them away. We have 17 days until April 1, so I'm going to have 4 contests. Two are for everyone, one contest is for librarians and booksellers, and 1 is for kids.

I thought I'd start with a drawing for everyone. But, you can't just submit your name. Here's the challenge:
In the book, Ted wakes up one morning to find a yak in his bed. To enter this contest, you have to think of the strangest thing you could wake up and find in bed with you. (And my site is PG-13/R. No X-rated stuff. It's too easy.) This contest will actually be determined by a drawing on Sunday, so you have a couple of days. To enter, use the comment section to post your idea of the strangest thing you could find in bed. If you post anonymously or your profile has no way to contact you, then you'll need to leave your name or email so I can contact you. I'll also post the winners. There are 3 books up for grab this round.