In a Hotel Garden

Josipovici Gabriel

"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.

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).

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