The Bedside Table Interview: Gabriel Josipovici

Horizon Review: What’s on your bedside table at the moment?

A bedside lamp and a number of books.

HR: Why are you reading the books?

For pleasure.

HR: Which is your favourite and why?

I don’t know which is my favourite. When I finish a book – it takes a while as I go to sleep fairly soon after going to bed – I put it on the shelves. But I’m reading my way through those Queneau novels I’ve never read before - Loin de Rueil, Les Fleurs Bleues, Le Dimanche de la Vie – and loving and admiring him more and more as I do so.

HR: Any books you wish you could be reading right now and why?

No, I’m very happy to be reading the books I am. And it’s wonderful not to have to worry any more about buying the books I want.

HR: Any books there you’d rather not be reading? Why so?

These days I don’t read books I would rather not be reading, certainly not before going to sleep.

HR: Interesting that you say you this. Some journalists seemed to think that your new book, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, was all about attacking books you’d read which you didn’t want to be reading. What did they miss?

In order to make my point clearer about the fiction I like and which I had spent most of the book discussing, I felt I should lightly touch on the fiction I was told I should like and which I found perfectly pleasant but not in any sense gripping.

In order to do that I took from the shelves in the spare room – where I tend to put titles I am never likely to re-read – a few books by writers highly touted in England in the fifties, and then some from the present era. I opened them more or less at random and quoted a few lines, and then analysed why this kind of writing did not seem to me capable of being talked about in the same breath as the writers I admired.

Imagine my surprise when journalists and reviewers homed in on those few pages of the book and laid into me for defaming national treasures. With hindsight I suppose I feel it only proves my point.

HR: Which literary critics, if any, did you gravitate towards for your research for the book and what did you relate to in them?

There was no ‘research’ for the book. It is an extended essay, not a scholarly tome. The critics I partially re-read as I was writing it were those who had meant much to me when I was twenty and still mean much to me today: Erich Heller and Maurice Blanchot; and then Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin, whom I got to know much later.

But mainly I re-read the books I wanted to talk about: Don Quixote, Doktor Faustus, the works of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Duras’s L’Amante Anglaise, Golding’s Pincher Martin. They provided the most profound criticism.

HR: If you were to take as a model Ezra Pound’s canon-building attempts in How to Read and The A B C of Reading, which writers would you suggest are essential reads of the twenty-first century and why? Alternatively, where would you point readers to start building their own canons? 

Do you mean twenty-first century writers, or writers meaningful today?

HR: Hah! OK. Which 21st century writers would you put your hypothetical money on as still being meaningful in, say, a century’s time? (I’m thinking, for example, of Tom McCarthy, who is very much steeped in modernism and avant garde traditions as a reader, but maybe writing more in a slipstream vein.)

Thomas Bernhard goes on speaking from beyond the grave. His wonderful My Prizes came out last year in Germany and will soon be available in this country. I recently heard the director of the French Institute saying: ‘If the twentieth century was the century of Proust, then the twenty-first will be the century of Queneau’. I love the work of Agota Kristof and Jean Echenoz in French and Rosalind Belben in English and feel sure it will last. I have not read anything by an English or American writer who has emerged since the turn of the century that has particularly impressed me, but then I have not read much at all.

HR: Where do you go for recommendations of new literature that you would hope to find exciting?

Friends, reviews – with the latter of course I am usually disappointed, but I keep trying.

HR: Are you working on anything else at moment that readers can look forward to?

Yes, a novel is on its way. In fact I wrote What Ever Happened to Modernism? because I was stuck with that novel. I hoped that by concentrating on something quite different for an intense period I would come back to it and see a way through – and it worked!