In a Hotel Garden by Gabriel Josipovici
In a Hotel Garden is the strangest and most enigmatic of Gabriel Josipovici's many strange and enigmatic novels. On the surface it is a simple story of the growing obsession of a young Englishman for a Jewish woman he meets on holiday. Gradually it reveals itself as an exploration of the power of memory and imagination, also raising the question of how far it is possible for non-Jews to understand Jews, however intrigued by them they may be. In a haunting play of echoes the novel presents us not with one hotel garden but two, embedded respectively in the stony landscape of Tuscany and also the forested mountains of Alto Adige; not one story of erotic obsession but two, one played out in Italy in the 1920s, the other in present-day London- as though, while the characters search desperately for singularity, the world provides them only with doubles. Behind the story looms the destruction of the Jews of Europe: can we ever come to terms with this in ways which are not sentimental or false? Here what has been implicit in Josipovici 's earliest fiction becomes explicit; the writing takes on a new dimension, most notably in the description of the great walk over the mountain in the Dolimites which forms the mysterious centre of this remarkable book.
Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 to Jewish parents of Italo-Russian, Romano-Levantine extraction. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to England. He read English at a St.Edmund Hall, Oxford and from 1963 to 1998 was first a lecturer, then a Professor in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of some twenty novels, ten books of criticism, a memoir of his mother, the poet Sacha Rabinovitch, and numerous stage and radio plays. His reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times Literary Supplement, the New York and the London Review of Books. Carcanet publish his novels and fictions Contre-Jour (1986), In the Fertile Land (1987), Steps (1990), The Big Glass (1991), In a Hotel Garden (1993) and Moo Pak (1995) and his essays Text and Voice (1993). His most recent fictions with Carcanet are The Cemetery in Barnes (2018), longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize, and Hotel Andromeda (2014). Carcanet also published his non-fiction Forgetting (2019) and 100 Days (2021) and the combined fiction and literary critical book Partita and A Winter in Zürau (2024).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780856359989 |
| ISBN 10 | 085635998X |
| Title | In a Hotel Garden |
| Author | Gabriel Josipovici |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Carcanet Press Ltd |
| Year published | 1994-02-25 |
| Number of pages | 144 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |