Gabriel Josipovici at Eighty-Five

Gabriel Josipovici is one of the leading writers and critics of his generation. He has been astonishingly prolific. Over more than fifty years he has written two dozen novels and books of short stories, as well as written and edited almost twenty books of criticism, from The World and the Book (1971) to A Winter in Zürau (2024).

Perhaps most striking of all has been his range of interests. In an interview he gave in 2015 he said,

I love the narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the narratives of the Border Ballads and of the Grimm tales, but most so-called classical novels turn me off – I don’t want to be filled with Stendahl’s or George Eliot’s inventions, or even Tolstoy’s, all those descriptions of clothes and rooms and the rest – I want books that leave a space for me to discover myself, like Proust’s or Kafka’s, or that get my body dancing, like those of Queneau and Muriel Spark. Lots happens in Balzac and Dickens, but I’d rather read Chandler or Wodehouse, writers who know that what they are doing is neither ‘significant’ nor ‘real’.

Take his first book, The World and the Book (1971), which ranges from Chaucer and Rabelais to Proust and American writers like Hawthorne and Bellow. Then in The Lessons of Modernism, a book of essays written during the early 1970s, he moved on to Kafka, Pessoa, Walter Benjamin and Bellow and composers like Peter Maxwell Davies and Stockhausen. Later, there are books on the Hebrew Bible and Hamlet, on touch and forgetting.
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