Gabriel Josipovici (Gabriel David Josipovici) Biography

British writer, born in France; he grew up in Egypt and moved to England in 1956. He became a lecturer in literature at Sussex University in 1963, and a part-time professor in 1984. In both his novels and his plays he is concerned with identity, memory, and the nature of perception. Often abandoning the traditional fictional structures, his work reconstructs the world rather than imitating it. His novels include The Inventory (1968), Words (1971), and The Present (1975). His concern with the difficulties of individual communication has led some critics to regard the characters in his novels as descendants of the isolated beings of Samuel Beckett. Contre-Jour (1986) is a study of the relationship between a painter (based on Pierre Bonnard), his estranged wife, and their imaginary daughter. The Big Glass (1991), whose title is an allusion to Marcel Duchamp's celebrated work, is a fictionalized account of the artist's life. Later novels include In a Hotel Garden (1993) and Moo Pak (1994). His plays include Mobius and the Stripper (1974) and Vergil Dying (1977). Amongst his works of literary criticism are The Lessons of Modernism (1977), The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (1988), his edition of The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Book (1975), and Text and Voice (1992).