Overview
This personal book explores both the public and the private dimensions of forgetting and its scary Siamese twin, remembering.Forgetting takes in our modern fear of Alzheimer’s and dementia; the abuse to which such slogans as ‘Remember Auschwitz!’ can be put; the human need to bury the dead and our modern inability to do so; tombstone inscriptions and war memorials today; and how poets and novelists help us to understand these dilemmas. Gabriel Josipovici’s novel The Cemetery in Barnes (2018) was shortlisted for the 2018 Goldsmiths Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
Author Biography
Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of nineteen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France, and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic.