In a Hotel Garden - Softcover

Josipovici, Gabriel

3.56

32 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811212912 ISBN 13: 9780811212915

Publisher: New Directions, 1995

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"In a Hotel Garden" is the strangest and most enigmatic of Gabriel Josipovici's many strange, enigmatic novels. On the surface it is a simple story of the growing obsession young Englishman with a Jewish woman he meets on holiday. Gradually it reveals itself as an exploration of power of memory and imagination, also raising vividly 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 hotel garden but two, embedded respectively in the stony landscape of Tuscany and in the forested mountains of Alto Adige; not one story of erotic obsession but two, played out in Italy in the 1920s, the other in present-day London. A great walk over a mountain in the Dolomites forms the mysterious centre of this book. Behind the story looms our dilemma of coming to terms with the destruction of European Jews.

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About the Author:

One of Europe's most innovative and admired thinkers and writers, Gabriel Josipovici has published more than a dozen novels, three volumes of short stories, several books of criticism, and plays that are widely performed throughout Europe. He lives in Lewes, England.

From Publishers Weekly:

While it may be more accessible than others of Josipovici's novels (The Inventory, Words, The Echo Chamber), In a Hotel Garden is not more enjoyable. There's nothing to sink your teeth into: the story's aimless; the characters, caricatured; the images, indistinct and fleeting. In contemporary Putney Heath, Ben is the perpetual odd man out, hanging around the kitchen of his friends Rick and Fran. While walking the dog or helping to prepare salads, Ben recalls a vacation to the Dolomites that probably doomed his relationship with Sand, his girlfriend at the time, but it opened up the possibility of a new one with tediously vague Liliane. ``Lily'' has just been to Siena looking for a garden that had some import to her grandmother, a Jewish woman from Constantinople, and that Lily has invested with the power to make her understand herself and the Holocaust. It's a lot to pin on a garden. It's also more than this novel can bear. Josipovici works mostly with dialogue; and while interruptions, cross-purposes, daily disposable chatter, verbal tics and the like lend verisimilitude onstage, they're like iced molasses on this narrative.

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