Carcanet Press - The Teller and the Tale

Description
Author
Awards
Reviews

‘We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,’ writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a quarter of a century’s worth of critical reflection on modern art and literature, Biblical culture, Jewish theology, European identity, the nature of beginnings, and the bittersweetness of writing fiction – to name but a few of the subjects upon which Josipovici’s ranging, pansophic attention rests. The author describes paths between these distant regions of space and time with characteristic warmth and ingenuity. Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Pasternak, Eliot, Spark, Valéry, and Beckett dwell here alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cervantes, and the Brothers Grimm. Each of these great writers is a point of departure for personal reflection, and a series of critical essays takes on a second life as a book of intimate recollections and fond remembrances, recalling departed friends and peers, evoking the pain and ecstasy of childhood, the personal struggle to be a writer, and the life-long project of becoming a person. Here is a snapshot of influences on one of the English language’s most distinctive voices, and an opinionated, sensual, and informed exposition on Western literature and culture.

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 ... read more

Awards won by Gabriel Josipovici Long-listed, 2019 The Republic of Consciousness Prize (The Cemetery in Barnes) Short-listed, 2018 The Goldsmiths Prize (The Cemetery in Barnes)

Praise for Gabriel Josipovici '...an unsettling, exploratory and seductive read which challenges the essential strangeness of existence.'

Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast

  '...a mixture of biography, literary criticism and psychological insight, that make up one of the best things on Kafka I have read.'
Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator
'Clear, disturbing, compelling'
Kirsty Gunn
'In prose that is lively and learned, perceptive and persuasive, Josipovici's timely meditations proffer both consolation and challenges to the knotty problem of forgetting and remembering...[a] slim yet insightful volume.'
Ian Ellison, Journal of European Studies
'Exciting, stimulating literary criticism...Josipovici has always been one of our most ambitious and wide-ranging critics. 100 Days is an extraordinary collection of reflections and criticism, a joy to read and, in its personal revelations, deeply moving.'
David Herman, Jewish Chronicle
'Deceptively slight, disarmingly circumstantial, they are a joy to read...not an essay goes by without some passing insight into the elusive nature of artistic experience...charming.'
Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement
'Josipovici is at his best in his dissections of art's representations, its bridges between personal and cultural worlds.'
Bernadette Ashby, DURA Dundee
'Gabriel Josipovici provides an elegant lesson, to cite the title of his final chapter, in letting go'
Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement
'Forgetting is second to none on the demands of the present when it comes to our cultural memory. Josipovici writes generously, with deep consideration and empathy, on the subject and has written an enlightening collection that serves as both consolation and a warning during this time of crisis.'
Jack Solloway, Review 31
'To call it a "success" would be praise too simple for such a rich work. It is a book to be remembered and re-remembered'
Scott Beauchamp, The New Criterion
'As always, Josipovici asks big questions. Why, as a culture, are we fascinated by issues of forgetting? Is there something a little anxious about the injunction to "never forget"?'
David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
  '... a fascinating book of reflections on memory and forgetting... This mix of detailed readings has been typical of Jisopovici's critical work... It is what has made him one of the outstanding critics of our time.'
David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
'On first read this slender volume of sixty pages is at once recognized as being among the highest quality of literature [...] Poetic, dramatic, and certainly lyrical.'

Rogue Literary Society

'Art demans a certain silence, when creating it and viewing it. Josipovici captures the essence of this silence in both the art and the artist himself in this deceptively complex narrative which he subtitles, "A Triptych after Pierre Bonnard"'

Melissa Beck, The Book Binder's Daughter

A 'subtle, disconcerting and remarkable novel'
Volume, 2019

'the novel shows its characters overwhelmed by the temporal medium in which everything takes place, and the characters are depicted not so much against light (contre-jour) as against time (contre-temps)... time is always the overwhelming, unresolvable problem.'

Volume, 2019
'The narrative is constantly destabilised, leaving us puzzling over what is and isn't 'true'... his debts to writers like Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet are obvious.'
Simon Collings, Stride
'Josipovici's best fiction has always been able to turn silence and reticence into powerful emotions, producing stories of pain and sadness. Contre-Jour is Josipovici at his very best.'
David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
  'The Cemetery in Barnes, though outwardly modest, expands in the mind and then lingers there - a tribute to its author's rejection of the need to explain, his willingness to hint at all the ways in which life is a "labyrinth" without trying to say the last word about any of them.'
Leo Robson, The New Statesman
'The Cemetery in Barnes is a subtle, disturbing meditation on death and desire, on murder, suicide and arson glimpsed, as it were, out of the corner of the eye; an examination of a life lived in three locations and told - the cue being taken from Monteverdi's Orfeo - in three interweaving voices, whose total effect has the disturbing power of a bad dream.'
Nick Lezard, Goldsmiths Prize Judge

'A seriously amusing, at times amusingly serious novella... its artfulness partly lies in its temporary suspension of certainty'

Michael Caines, TLS

'Concealed in this wry interview is an exhilarating "world tour" of music, and how it comes to be created. Music aficionados will recognise Infinity's central figure with delight; newcomers will learn all they need, and more, about an extraordinary composer, and the anguished musical era - the twentieth century - in which he lived and worked.'
Judith Weir
'Gabriel Josipovici is a deeply perceptive critic, always rewarding with a wide range of reference. The Singer on the Shore is a beautifully written and enjoyable book.'
Dame Muriel Spark 'A tour de force of straightfaced high-culture lunacy ... very funny, deeply serious, at once scathing about the sublime preposterousness of modernism and profoundly admiring of it. Infinity is that rare thing - a novel about a creative genius in whose artistry you are made to believe, and who, for all his monstrous egoism and crackpot theorising, you come to care about and finally applaud.'
Howard Jacobson 'A Doctor Faustus for our time. Like Thomas Mann's great novel, Infinity shows how a composer's times are reflected in the creative process of composing, and has the novel's structure itself parallel the composer's aesthetic. Books as insightful as these into the composer's world are rare indeed.'
Jonathan Harvey 'Josipovici is one of the UK's most distinguished and fearless writers... [Infinity] is a charming, sexy, modern and scholarly novel - an unusual mix but all the better for it.'
Deborah Levy, Jewish Quarterly
'Gabriel Josipovici's Infinity is a wondrous Mobius strip of a narrative that turns ideas of biography, memory and the making of art into a story that one reads with rapt attention, in one sitting.'
Kirsty Gunn, Scotsman Books of the Year 2012
'Gabriel Josipovici is a deeply perceptive critic, always rewarding with a wide range of reference. The Singer on the Shore is a beautifully written and enjoyable book.'
Dame Muriel Spark

Quote of the Day Your list has always been interesting, idiosyncratic, imaginative and your translations [...] have been a source of pleasure to me. Al Alvarez Home Events Authors Titles Paperback Hardback Limited Edition Journal CD eBook Audiobook Exact Editions Imprints Anvil Press Poetry Aspects of Portugal Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Carcanet Poetry Fyfield Books Little Island Press Lives and Letters Northern House OxfordPoets PN Review Information About Us PN Review Turns 50 Years Old! Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! Academic Enquiries Authors for Events Catalogue Contact Us Copyright and Permissions Join Our Mailing List Opportunities at Carcanet Press Enquiries PN Review PN Review Creative Writing Prize Returns Policy Shopping Guide Stocklist Submission Guidelines Trade Information Resources Audio Gallery Reading Group Guides Video
Book Search Search > advanced search Subscribe to our mailing list
Order by 16th December to receive books in time for Christmas. Please bear in mind that all orders may be subject to postal delays that are beyond our control.
The Teller and the Tale Essays on Literature and Culture 1990 - 2015 Gabriel Josipovici 10% off eBook (EPUB) 10% off Paperback Categories: 21st Century, Italian Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (320 pages) (Pub. Oct 2016) 9781784102128 £14.99 £13.49 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! (Pub. Sep 2016) 9781784102135 £11.99 £10.79 Digital access available through Exact Editions To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have and are not prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions. Description Author Awards Reviews ‘We seem to live, intellectually and emotionally, in sealed-off universes,’ writes Gabriel Josipovici in an essay on Hebrew poetry in medieval Spain, just one in a lively multiverse of writings gathered in The Teller and the Tale. The book draws on a quarter of a century’s worth of critical reflection on modern art and literature, Biblical culture, Jewish theology, European identity, the nature of beginnings, and the bittersweetness of writing fiction – to name but a few of the subjects upon which Josipovici’s ranging, pansophic attention rests. The author describes paths between these distant regions of space and time with characteristic warmth and ingenuity. Proust, Kafka, Woolf, Pasternak, Eliot, Spark, Valéry, and Beckett dwell here alongside Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Cervantes, and the Brothers Grimm. Each of these great writers is a point of departure for personal reflection, and a series of critical essays takes on a second life as a book of intimate recollections and fond remembrances, recalling departed friends and peers, evoking the pain and ecstasy of childhood, the personal struggle to be a writer, and the life-long project of becoming a person. Here is a snapshot of influences on one of the English language’s most distinctive voices, and an opinionated, sensual, and informed exposition on Western literature and culture. 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 ... read more Awards won by Gabriel Josipovici Long-listed, 2019 The Republic of Consciousness Prize (The Cemetery in Barnes) Short-listed, 2018 The Goldsmiths Prize (The Cemetery in Barnes) Praise for Gabriel Josipovici '...an unsettling, exploratory and seductive read which challenges the essential strangeness of existence.' Georgia de Chamberet, BookBlast '...a mixture of biography, literary criticism and psychological insight, that make up one of the best things on Kafka I have read.' Nicholas Lezard, The Spectator 'Clear, disturbing, compelling' Kirsty Gunn 'In prose that is lively and learned, perceptive and persuasive, Josipovici's timely meditations proffer both consolation and challenges to the knotty problem of forgetting and remembering...[a] slim yet insightful volume.' Ian Ellison, Journal of European Studies 'Exciting, stimulating literary criticism...Josipovici has always been one of our most ambitious and wide-ranging critics. 100 Days is an extraordinary collection of reflections and criticism, a joy to read and, in its personal revelations, deeply moving.' David Herman, Jewish Chronicle 'Deceptively slight, disarmingly circumstantial, they are a joy to read...not an essay goes by without some passing insight into the elusive nature of artistic experience...charming.' Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement 'Josipovici is at his best in his dissections of art's representations, its bridges between personal and cultural worlds.' Bernadette Ashby, DURA Dundee 'Gabriel Josipovici provides an elegant lesson, to cite the title of his final chapter, in letting go' Ben Hutchinson, Times Literary Supplement 'Forgetting is second to none on the demands of the present when it comes to our cultural memory. Josipovici writes generously, with deep consideration and empathy, on the subject and has written an enlightening collection that serves as both consolation and a warning during this time of crisis.' Jack Solloway, Review 31 'To call it a "success" would be praise too simple for such a rich work. It is a book to be remembered and re-remembered' Scott Beauchamp, The New Criterion 'As always, Josipovici asks big questions. Why, as a culture, are we fascinated by issues of forgetting? Is there something a little anxious about the injunction to "never forget"?' David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle '... a fascinating book of reflections on memory and forgetting... This mix of detailed readings has been typical of Jisopovici's critical work... It is what has made him one of the outstanding critics of our time.' David Herman, *The Jewish Chronicle* 'On first read this slender volume of sixty pages is at once recognized as being among the highest quality of literature [...] Poetic, dramatic, and certainly lyrical.' *Rogue Literary Society* 'Art demans a certain silence, when creating it and viewing it. Josipovici captures the essence of this silence in both the art and the artist himself in this deceptively complex narrative which he subtitles, "A Triptych after Pierre Bonnard"' Melissa Beck, The Book Binder's Daughter A 'subtle, disconcerting and remarkable novel' Volume, 2019 'the novel shows its characters overwhelmed by the temporal medium in which everything takes place, and the characters are depicted not so much against light (contre-jour) as against time (contre-temps)... time is always the overwhelming, unresolvable problem.' Volume, 2019 'The narrative is constantly destabilised, leaving us puzzling over what is and isn't 'true'... his debts to writers like Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet are obvious.' Simon Collings, Stride 'Josipovici's best fiction has always been able to turn silence and reticence into powerful emotions, producing stories of pain and sadness. Contre-Jour is Josipovici at his very best.' David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle 'The Cemetery in Barnes, though outwardly modest, expands in the mind and then lingers there - a tribute to its author's rejection of the need to explain, his willingness to hint at all the ways in which life is a "labyrinth" without trying to say the last word about any of them.' Leo Robson, The New Statesman 'The Cemetery in Barnes is a subtle, disturbing meditation on death and desire, on murder, suicide and arson glimpsed, as it were, out of the corner of the eye; an examination of a life lived in three locations and told - the cue being taken from Monteverdi's Orfeo - in three interweaving voices, whose total effect has the disturbing power of a bad dream.' Nick Lezard, Goldsmiths Prize Judge 'A seriously amusing, at times amusingly serious novella... its artfulness partly lies in its temporary suspension of certainty' Michael Caines, TLS 'Concealed in this wry interview is an exhilarating "world tour" of music, and how it comes to be created. Music aficionados will recognise Infinity's central figure with delight; newcomers will learn all they need, and more, about an extraordinary composer, and the anguished musical era - the twentieth century - in which he lived and worked.' Judith Weir 'Gabriel Josipovici is a deeply perceptive critic, always rewarding with a wide range of reference. The Singer on the Shore is a beautifully written and enjoyable book.' Dame Muriel Spark 'A tour de force of straightfaced high-culture lunacy ... very funny, deeply serious, at once scathing about the sublime preposterousness of modernism and profoundly admiring of it. Infinity is that rare thing - a novel about a creative genius in whose artistry you are made to believe, and who, for all his monstrous egoism and crackpot theorising, you come to care about and finally applaud.' Howard Jacobson 'A Doctor Faustus for our time. Like Thomas Mann's great novel, Infinity shows how a composer's times are reflected in the creative process of composing, and has the novel's structure itself parallel the composer's aesthetic. Books as insightful as these into the composer's world are rare indeed.' Jonathan Harvey 'Josipovici is one of the UK's most distinguished and fearless writers... [Infinity] is a charming, sexy, modern and scholarly novel - an unusual mix but all the better for it.' Deborah Levy, Jewish Quarterly 'Gabriel Josipovici's Infinity is a wondrous Mobius strip of a narrative that turns ideas of biography, memory and the making of art into a story that one reads with rapt attention, in one sitting.' *Kirsty Gunn, Scotsman* Books of the Year 2012** 'Gabriel Josipovici is a deeply perceptive critic, always rewarding with a wide range of reference. The Singer on the Shore is a beautifully written and enjoyable book.' Dame Muriel Spark	Share this... Quick Links Carcanet Poetry Carcanet Classics Carcanet Fiction Carcanet Film Lives and Letters PN Review Video Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years! The Carcanet Blog One Little Room: Peter McDonald read more Collected Poems: Mimi Khalvati read more Invisible Dog: Fabio Morbito, translated by Richard Gwyn read more Dante's Purgatorio: Philip Terry read more Billy 'Nibs' Buckshot: John Gallas read more Emotional Support Horse: Claudine Toutoungi read more
We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
Privacy Statement Sitemap RSS Feeds Home Events Authors Titles Imprints Information Resources This website ©2000-2024 Carcanet Press Ltd

The Teller and the Tale

Essays on Literature and Culture 1990 - 2015

Gabriel Josipovici