Why is Gabriel Josipovici not working today? Why are so many of his books out of print? How can it be that On Trust is out of print? How can The Book of God be out of print? Did no one read them? Everyone should read them. Everyone should read them.

I have to think people don’t like what he has to say. Is that it? Is it that simple? To me, these books are crucial. They speak to me on an elemental level, about life and modernity and literature. And they are beautifully written.

I’ll have more to say about why I think Josipovici’s work is so necessary—and why it speaks to me so personally. But for now, just praise. And a reminder: the more recent collection of essays, The Singer on the Shore, is equally fantastic. You should go out of your way to read it. Read it.

Seconded.

1. Where is the room in which the protagonist of Josipovici’s novel finds himself? When is it? Minimal description (but then the whole narrative is written minimally): greyness and silence, broken only by the sound of his feet echoing on the bare boards. Then, sometimes, the cries of children in the playground below, and the hum of city traffic, far away. But for the most part, greyness and silence, and the protagonist, Felix, looking out of the window.

Definitely go and check it out.

But for Josipovici, incompleteness is itself precisely one of the things that the realist novel shuns by assuming that it already is the perfect vehicle for anything one might wish to express. The Modernists and their precursors such as Sterne and Rabelais saw that the regular and incurious form of the realist novel reinforced a view of life that, for starters, denied the pivotal roles of doubt, ambiguity and failure in human affairs. In Proust, Kafka and Eliot, Josipovici found writers who not only realized that art is often unable to articulate our experience, but who had also grasped that this understanding had to be worked into the very heart of the writer’s approach.

I’m a little biased on this one for ‘I-acquired-the-book-for-Harper-Perennial’ related reasons, but you .

is an amazing writer and he has a bunch of great books— Moo Pak; Contre-Jour; his most recent collection of critical essays, Singer on the Shore; to name just a few — that should jump to the top of your reading list straight away. I’m serious.

Bach’s composition has earned its own list of variations (not least, Glenn Gould’s famous recording, recently digitized for a player piano; a Jerome Robbins ballet; and Richard Powers’s novel The Gold Bug Variations). Yet Josipovici has done something delightfully daring for his homage: With the trick of a colon, his rendition proposes variations on Goldberg himself. The novel’s setting is not Germany but nineteenth-century England; the insomniac is not a count but a wealthy aristocrat unmoved by music; and Goldberg, here named Samuel, is not a musician but a storyteller—a Scheherazade plagued with writer’s block for whom Queneau-esque variations are the only solution.