Taking his cue from an anecdote connected with Bach's late masterpiece, the Goldberg Variations, Gabriel Josipovici imagines an English writer, a Jew, at the turn of the eighteenth century, who is invited to the house of a country gentleman in order to read him to sleep. What follows can be read as a set of disconnected stories on the most varied of topics - incest in the Orkneys, madness in Chester, a poetic competition at the court of George III, a marital quarrel, weaving past and present until it reached its bizarre climax. Part homage to Bach, part pure fiction and part evocation of echoes from the past - the ghosts of Holderlin, Kierkegaard and many others haunts its pages, this is a book as exciting and thought-provoking as any Josipovici has written, from his Bonnard-inspired Contre-Jour to his hilarious dialogue-novel, Now.
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Taking his cue from an anecdote connected with Bach's late masterpiece, the Goldberg Variations, Gabriel Josipovici imagines an English writer, a Jew, at the turn of the eighteenth century, who is invited to the house of a country gentleman in order to read him to sleep. What follows can be read as a set of disconnected stories on the most varied of topics - incest in the Orkneys, madness in Chester, a poetic competition at the court of George III, a marital quarrel, weaving past and present until it reached its bizarre climax. Part homage to Bach, part pure fiction and part evocation of echoes from the past - the ghosts of Holderlin, Kierkegaard and many others haunts its pages, this is a book as exciting and thought-provoking as any Josipovici has written, from his Bonnard-inspired Contre-Jour to his hilarious dialogue-novel, Now.
