Partita and A Winter in Zurau
In "Partita", Gabriel Josipovici's precipitate novel, Michael Penderecki is in flight. Someone has threatened to kill him. He is surrounded by sinister questions. Who is the woman dead in the bathtub? Is she really dead? Why does the voice of Yves Montand singing "Les Feuilles d'Automne" emerge from the horn of an antique phonograph in an otherwise silent room in a villa in Sils Maria? Why are the sentences so short and the movement so fast? Josipovici's most melodramatic and enigmatic fiction to date, "Partita" is as though one of Magritte's paintings had come to life to the rhythms of a Bach partita.
In the longer piece, "A Winter in Zurau", the protagonist is also in flight: Franz Kafka, diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, in his thirtyfourth year, escapes from Prague to his sister's smallholding in Upper Bohemia. He leaves behind, he hopes, a dreaded office job, a domineering father, his fiancee Felice and any thoughts of marriage, and the hothouse literary culture of his native city. Free of that, he hopes finally to make sense of his life and his strange compulsion to write stories which, he knows, will bring him neither fame nor financial reward. This is not conventional fiction; it is a critical, biographical inquiry into eight crucial months in Kafka's life, months of anguish and reflection that resulted in the famous Aphorisms.
In the longer piece, "A Winter in Zurau", the protagonist is also in flight: Franz Kafka, diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, in his thirtyfourth year, escapes from Prague to his sister's smallholding in Upper Bohemia. He leaves behind, he hopes, a dreaded office job, a domineering father, his fiancee Felice and any thoughts of marriage, and the hothouse literary culture of his native city. Free of that, he hopes finally to make sense of his life and his strange compulsion to write stories which, he knows, will bring him neither fame nor financial reward. This is not conventional fiction; it is a critical, biographical inquiry into eight crucial months in Kafka's life, months of anguish and reflection that resulted in the famous Aphorisms.
About the author
Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of sixteen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published "A Life", a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are "Two Novels: After and Making Mistakes" (Carcanet), "What Ever Happened to Modernism?" (Yale University Press) and "Heart's Wings" (Carcanet, 2010).