A Life

Gabriel Josipovici

Editions

Review

Gabriel Josipovici is not like other writers.  He used to be described as an experimental novelist, as if this was some mysterious dying breed, to be treasured like giant pandas.  But with his last few books (Touch hbk £19.95 and On Trust: Art And The Temptations Of Suspicion hbk £22.50, in particular) he has moved elsewhere, and it feels now as if he is really writing his own books instead of paying homage to others.  The latest is a case in point: personal and passionate, it is about as far from the cerebral fictional ventures as could be.  It is a memoir of his mother.

Born in Egypt, of European Jewish extraction, she married in France in the 1930s, separated, and escaped from Nice in 1944. After the war she returned to Egypt, then moved to England for the sake of her son’s education.  For a short time, while her son was at Oxford, she lived in Putney and worked in a bookshop.  Then she moved into a house with him outside Oxford because it was cheaper than paying two lots of rent (she worked at Blackwells).  They lived together until her death in the 1990s.  She was the most important person in his life, and he felt bound to write about her – both in homage and from love.  She comes across as a shy but strong woman, very sympathetic.  The book is moving and intense.

This book is notable also for being the last published by Alan Ross, in the month of his death (read his own Reflections on Blue Water, if you have not done so).  It is characteristic of that amazing man that he should see the point of a book like this.  A larger publisher might have tried to turn it into something else. - review by John de Falbe