The Teller and the Tale

'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 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt till 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and, from 1963 to 1998 taught literature in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of eighteen novels, three volumes of short stories, nine books of criticism, numerous plays for stage and radio, and a memoir-biography of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch.