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The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus: Four Novels: Out, Such, Between, Thru
These four novels by Christine Brooke-Rose each develop distinctive narrative patterns, changing the structures, textures, forms, and idioms of fiction to explore the central tensions and contradictions in culture. The novels are distinguished by their high wit, restless inventiveness, and the sharp focus of a European humanist reflecting on that culture.
650 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
About the author
Christine Brooke-Rose
42 books103 followersChristine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.
She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).
She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.
NYT obituary.
She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).
She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.
NYT obituary.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 24, 2013
Relevant to
Between
:
Having less time than the neuron firing in the cerebral vortex enabling the processing of what an eye reads flickers on the screen perhaps scribbles on a page pertaining to some such out of the blue what might seem nonsense etwas andere Bedeutung als bestellt, conjecture this an exercise in reading between the lines the characters the spaces the places the silences in between.
Bilingual Christine Brooke-Rose, both phictionalist and filosofist, finesses with apparent and actual (even if consciously or unconsciously rejected) loss: of identity, of language, of locatedness in time and space, of control, of independence, of autonomy, and of freedom from institutionalised labels (inescapable when activating reductionist thinking - see!) as well as oppression of creativity, of thinking, of movement, of sense of self, of gender, and the issue of exclusion arising from the exploration and pursuit of ideas refusing to conform to a prevailing power-based orthodoxy.
Her writing employs the overt form of narrative constraints* through omission and constraint and repetition, always slightly altered by one word phrase translation - she concentrates on the form and structure she creates to convey her aesthetic and moral concerns, content secondary, but not dismissed. Attach less importance to the tale she spins - her fiction - than to the weft and warp of her weave - her theory of literary criticism, which informs what she writes. The rarest of rare species, her form follows function, to appropriate an abused and generally absurd cliche, of which none appear in Between, in the sense that her aesthetic functions to examine the how and not the what of writing, thus creating the form she exploits: movement, described in the text by changing grammatical patterns, to mimic the movement of the main protagonist, always between states of existence, always between states of identity, constructed internally, reflected externally, constrained by both.
The multilingoquacity suggests, spuriously, a difficulty reading Between: the effect of the same word repeated in different languages reveals the gendered etymology and implications of language as a construction of inner and outer and demonstrates both the ability to contextualise situations through repeated experience of such, as well as the ability to deal with imprecision, with flux and change, and the inability to remain stagnant, a metaphor for surviving the modern world, if not necessarily admired or even accepted, that the search for identity both misconstrues and misinterprets; identity depends on nothing fixed, when it gambles upon stasis, it risks collapse if confronted with circumstances or events it can neither control influence transform mitigate eradicate, like the neuron firing in the cerebral vortex enabling the processing of what an eye reads flickers on the screen perhaps scribbles on a page pertaining to some such out of the blue what might seem nonsense plus ou moins autre signification comme l'a ordonne; conjecture this an exercise in reading between the lines the characters the spaces the places the silences in between.
*This review steals at least two of her constraints in its narration.
From Between, Out of Such words...
"And yet the man from [hothell room] 230 or thereabouts looked straight across and eyes met eyes. The blear-faced blear-aged man unhesitatingly unanswered at one level. The same question everywhere goes unanswered have you anything to declare any plants or parts of plants growing inside you stifling your strength with their octopus legs undetachable for the vacuum they form over each cell, clamping each neurone of your processes in a death-kiss while the new Lord Mayor of Prague promises to take up the challenge in trying to make you commit yourself to one single idea.
— Ideas? We merely translate other people’s ideas, not to mention platitudes, si-mul-ta-né-ment. No one requires us to have any of our own. We live between ideas, nicht wahr, Siegfried?
— Du liebes Kind, komm, geh’ mit mir. Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir.
— We have played those games mein Lieb.
— Why don’t you marry me?
— You know why.
Such conversations never quite occur in such romantic terms unless in quotes expressing falsely something there no doubt, except in the precision of the mouthpiece at nineteen or twenty-five even. Bright girl, she translates beautifully don’t you think? Says the boss. Meaning in his greying English way come live with me and adorn my gracious Regency London house with your charming French accent not to mention cuisine your German super-Aryan litheness and of course Fleissigkeit as well as your elegant cosmopolitan ways. The divine principle of love or flow of rash enthusiasm descending into matter bumps on the steps of air, lowers its undercarriage touches down speeds along the runway in a whistling roar of jets and strong tension of brakes that slow it to a taxying up the tarmac guided by some distant brain in a green glass booth and small white frogs with yellow discs for eyes until it comes to a standstill. A faint sensation of relief spreads through the body of the plane, slightly animating the chromosomes as if inside a giant centipede. Please declare if you have any plants or parts of plants with you such as love loyalty lust intellect belief of any kind or even simple enthusiasm for which you must pay duty to the Customs and Excise until you come to a standstill."
Is CBR not incomparably brilliant?
Having less time than the neuron firing in the cerebral vortex enabling the processing of what an eye reads flickers on the screen perhaps scribbles on a page pertaining to some such out of the blue what might seem nonsense etwas andere Bedeutung als bestellt, conjecture this an exercise in reading between the lines the characters the spaces the places the silences in between.
Bilingual Christine Brooke-Rose, both phictionalist and filosofist, finesses with apparent and actual (even if consciously or unconsciously rejected) loss: of identity, of language, of locatedness in time and space, of control, of independence, of autonomy, and of freedom from institutionalised labels (inescapable when activating reductionist thinking - see!) as well as oppression of creativity, of thinking, of movement, of sense of self, of gender, and the issue of exclusion arising from the exploration and pursuit of ideas refusing to conform to a prevailing power-based orthodoxy.
Her writing employs the overt form of narrative constraints* through omission and constraint and repetition, always slightly altered by one word phrase translation - she concentrates on the form and structure she creates to convey her aesthetic and moral concerns, content secondary, but not dismissed. Attach less importance to the tale she spins - her fiction - than to the weft and warp of her weave - her theory of literary criticism, which informs what she writes. The rarest of rare species, her form follows function, to appropriate an abused and generally absurd cliche, of which none appear in Between, in the sense that her aesthetic functions to examine the how and not the what of writing, thus creating the form she exploits: movement, described in the text by changing grammatical patterns, to mimic the movement of the main protagonist, always between states of existence, always between states of identity, constructed internally, reflected externally, constrained by both.
The multilingoquacity suggests, spuriously, a difficulty reading Between: the effect of the same word repeated in different languages reveals the gendered etymology and implications of language as a construction of inner and outer and demonstrates both the ability to contextualise situations through repeated experience of such, as well as the ability to deal with imprecision, with flux and change, and the inability to remain stagnant, a metaphor for surviving the modern world, if not necessarily admired or even accepted, that the search for identity both misconstrues and misinterprets; identity depends on nothing fixed, when it gambles upon stasis, it risks collapse if confronted with circumstances or events it can neither control influence transform mitigate eradicate, like the neuron firing in the cerebral vortex enabling the processing of what an eye reads flickers on the screen perhaps scribbles on a page pertaining to some such out of the blue what might seem nonsense plus ou moins autre signification comme l'a ordonne; conjecture this an exercise in reading between the lines the characters the spaces the places the silences in between.
*This review steals at least two of her constraints in its narration.
From Between, Out of Such words...
"And yet the man from [hothell room] 230 or thereabouts looked straight across and eyes met eyes. The blear-faced blear-aged man unhesitatingly unanswered at one level. The same question everywhere goes unanswered have you anything to declare any plants or parts of plants growing inside you stifling your strength with their octopus legs undetachable for the vacuum they form over each cell, clamping each neurone of your processes in a death-kiss while the new Lord Mayor of Prague promises to take up the challenge in trying to make you commit yourself to one single idea.
— Ideas? We merely translate other people’s ideas, not to mention platitudes, si-mul-ta-né-ment. No one requires us to have any of our own. We live between ideas, nicht wahr, Siegfried?
— Du liebes Kind, komm, geh’ mit mir. Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir.
— We have played those games mein Lieb.
— Why don’t you marry me?
— You know why.
Such conversations never quite occur in such romantic terms unless in quotes expressing falsely something there no doubt, except in the precision of the mouthpiece at nineteen or twenty-five even. Bright girl, she translates beautifully don’t you think? Says the boss. Meaning in his greying English way come live with me and adorn my gracious Regency London house with your charming French accent not to mention cuisine your German super-Aryan litheness and of course Fleissigkeit as well as your elegant cosmopolitan ways. The divine principle of love or flow of rash enthusiasm descending into matter bumps on the steps of air, lowers its undercarriage touches down speeds along the runway in a whistling roar of jets and strong tension of brakes that slow it to a taxying up the tarmac guided by some distant brain in a green glass booth and small white frogs with yellow discs for eyes until it comes to a standstill. A faint sensation of relief spreads through the body of the plane, slightly animating the chromosomes as if inside a giant centipede. Please declare if you have any plants or parts of plants with you such as love loyalty lust intellect belief of any kind or even simple enthusiasm for which you must pay duty to the Customs and Excise until you come to a standstill."
Is CBR not incomparably brilliant?
January 31, 2014
The 4 crucial novels whereby CB-R established herself as one of the great British experimentalists of the 60s, alongside B.S.Johnson and Ann Quin. Actually she had started a career at the end of the 50s as a fairly conventional novelist in the same mode as Muriel Spark, but those 4 earlier novels have never been reprinted (although Spark was a great fan of them).
"Out" (1964) is often referred to as "science fiction", but has little in common with any genre SF then or now. It is set in Africa in the aftermath of some unspecified great disaster that swept away the privileged 1st and 2nd worlds so now the refugee survivors of those countries are living in shanty towns in the now-prosperous 3rd world, where the "colourless" are the second-class citizens now. There is an obvious element of commentary on apartheid and decolonisation, the challenge of civil rights in the US, but there is no didacticism or allegorising. The topical themes are just part of the kaleidoscopic backdrop in a story that is more about fragmentary, disordered consciousness and confusion.
"Such" (1966) is similarly a tale of mental disarrangement, this time without any suggestion of future apocalyptic worlds. There are clearly delineated characters, but they only come in to focus toward the end. We start with the chaotic thought-world of a psychologist who has suffered a sudden medical crisis. As consciousness gets back to a recognisable normality we can identify the blurry semi-fantastic creatures of the first half as phantoms of colleagues and family members. Our hero was at the centre of a mesh of preofessional jealousies, disappointments, and secret liaisons. His children are typical semi-rebellious mid-60s teens and the dialogue of the later chapters shows the whole narrative was a minor incident viewed from an oblique angle and expanded out to reveal all the deep psychology under the everyday. This is the nearest CBR comes to following the models of French experimenters like Claude Simon.
"Between" (1968) focuses on transit and translation. The central characters work as professional interpreters, constantly on the move between conferences, including academic ones where modish theories of structuralism and semiotics are in the air. The heroine is revealed in flashbacks to have spent her life on borderlines: mixed Franco-German parentage, brought up in Germany, working for Nazi intelligence services in the war, and then helping Allied interrogators after it. This parallels some details of CBR's wartime experience, and her comment that she learned to see the war from the German side. Of course Bletchley Park wasn't declassified until the 70s so when this novel was first published this aspect of the author's relation to her character would have been a private joke.
"Thru" (1975) is of course the one with all the typographical fun and games. It was her last book for about a decade and the entire tone of it seems to be marking the end of an era, in this case the whole world of 60s student radicalism and the revolutionary new theories bursting out of the campuses and becoming the new academic consensus in lit studies. The setting is a nameless US campus where a subversive new syllabus is now boring normality, in amongst the flea-picking rigours of the new depth-analysis in linguistics. Creative writing is also a course option and we get student texts in amongst the "idyll-within-the-idyll" that the class construct with their tutor, about her having a fantasy affair. Everyone is jaded and tired of upheaval, political and intellectual, and yesterday's new ideas and freedoms are now dull and yellowing. But this is not a banal essay about the "postmodern condition", the postmodernists are just another lot of vapouring ninnies to be put aside, and "Theory" is perceived already as what it is and will become: an empty irrelevance. The novel is a simple act of creation that doesn't need to be explained or justified on anyone else's terms. It's the work of an artists reflecting on the possibilities available to her, informed by the experience of all the work that went before, her own and the texts she studied. An author who ended up writing "Life, End Of" 30 years later, where the same voice can be heard again.
"Out" (1964) is often referred to as "science fiction", but has little in common with any genre SF then or now. It is set in Africa in the aftermath of some unspecified great disaster that swept away the privileged 1st and 2nd worlds so now the refugee survivors of those countries are living in shanty towns in the now-prosperous 3rd world, where the "colourless" are the second-class citizens now. There is an obvious element of commentary on apartheid and decolonisation, the challenge of civil rights in the US, but there is no didacticism or allegorising. The topical themes are just part of the kaleidoscopic backdrop in a story that is more about fragmentary, disordered consciousness and confusion.
"Such" (1966) is similarly a tale of mental disarrangement, this time without any suggestion of future apocalyptic worlds. There are clearly delineated characters, but they only come in to focus toward the end. We start with the chaotic thought-world of a psychologist who has suffered a sudden medical crisis. As consciousness gets back to a recognisable normality we can identify the blurry semi-fantastic creatures of the first half as phantoms of colleagues and family members. Our hero was at the centre of a mesh of preofessional jealousies, disappointments, and secret liaisons. His children are typical semi-rebellious mid-60s teens and the dialogue of the later chapters shows the whole narrative was a minor incident viewed from an oblique angle and expanded out to reveal all the deep psychology under the everyday. This is the nearest CBR comes to following the models of French experimenters like Claude Simon.
"Between" (1968) focuses on transit and translation. The central characters work as professional interpreters, constantly on the move between conferences, including academic ones where modish theories of structuralism and semiotics are in the air. The heroine is revealed in flashbacks to have spent her life on borderlines: mixed Franco-German parentage, brought up in Germany, working for Nazi intelligence services in the war, and then helping Allied interrogators after it. This parallels some details of CBR's wartime experience, and her comment that she learned to see the war from the German side. Of course Bletchley Park wasn't declassified until the 70s so when this novel was first published this aspect of the author's relation to her character would have been a private joke.
"Thru" (1975) is of course the one with all the typographical fun and games. It was her last book for about a decade and the entire tone of it seems to be marking the end of an era, in this case the whole world of 60s student radicalism and the revolutionary new theories bursting out of the campuses and becoming the new academic consensus in lit studies. The setting is a nameless US campus where a subversive new syllabus is now boring normality, in amongst the flea-picking rigours of the new depth-analysis in linguistics. Creative writing is also a course option and we get student texts in amongst the "idyll-within-the-idyll" that the class construct with their tutor, about her having a fantasy affair. Everyone is jaded and tired of upheaval, political and intellectual, and yesterday's new ideas and freedoms are now dull and yellowing. But this is not a banal essay about the "postmodern condition", the postmodernists are just another lot of vapouring ninnies to be put aside, and "Theory" is perceived already as what it is and will become: an empty irrelevance. The novel is a simple act of creation that doesn't need to be explained or justified on anyone else's terms. It's the work of an artists reflecting on the possibilities available to her, informed by the experience of all the work that went before, her own and the texts she studied. An author who ended up writing "Life, End Of" 30 years later, where the same voice can be heard again.
January 12, 2025
A challenging set of novels here. I found the earlier ones easier to read, Thru was heavy on literary theory and wordplay and I found it a bit of a slog
September 1, 2014
Other than the strangeness, these four books are not related. (Well, they are a bit, but more like compass points of a remote and isolated geography than any kind of coherant sequence.) So I went from not knowing anything about CB-R to reading four of her increasingly obtuse novels, consecutively, over the summer. The effect has been like having my brain sucked down a wormhole. Each book was further deconstructed. In Africa, after a cataclysm, colourless (whites?) have become the menials in a black society. But memory has been affected too, and the unemployment situation is out of control. The narrator of the first book-- Out-- is, to say the least, unreliable, and unhealthy to some strange degree. From his pov the book stutters and repeats and loops back on itself. Such cranked it up a notch (though I managed to come to a conclusion not too far removed from a few I've since read online). A mechanical parent, with five planet-babies, dissolves into a patient recovering from an accident, coma-memories twisted by injuries and perhaps a stream of drugs. (There is still conjecture here.) The third book, Between, is a cacaphony of language and voices, as an interpreter travels Europe. Sensations and sounds bombard her and us with no filters. Thru breaks down whatever's left. Paragraphs and sentences are no longer trusted. Narrative fractures, characters rebel... In some ways, reading these books was like a literary colonoscopy. Fall is here and I'm cleansed, ready for any sort of book next, maybe Finnegans Wake, finally, or something from that fine Dick and Jane series. I withold a star for several times making me feel stupid.
Read
July 11, 2023One begins reading “Out” thinking that one is in the presence of profound experiment. One completes “Thru” thinking that “Out” was utterly conventional. As these four novels progress, the reader is increasingly embedded in an investigation of semiotics and literary theory, a playful echolabia land, (s)peaking in tongues, in which allusion is illusory and verse visa. Critics have described Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as a literary cul-de-sac. That may be more or less accurate, but it must be admitted that, in “Thru” at the very least, Brooke-Rose entered the Joycean erection at the blind end of the cul-de-sac and designed and installed a marvellous 3rd-floor flat that both complements and transcends the house that James built. In any case, Brooke-Rose has fun with these novels, all of which are at least as much about how they mean as about what they mean.
December 1, 2012
I found "Such" and "Thru" to be the most interesting of the four, but there are some truly striking moments in each work. Well worth the work it takes to read.
January 18, 2025
I just woke up with the dried up menstrual blood of female Jesus in my hair, Isa is my best friend. I dreamt of Mary but the pictures were all black, and this winter is the best winter ever, my cousin wants to kill himself so I read him the secret teachings of all ages out loud and now i'm dead.
So yeah, these kind of books remind me of why I read,, when my mom told me to stop reading I should have listened but I was young and I wanted to know...
So yeah, these kind of books remind me of why I read,, when my mom told me to stop reading I should have listened but I was young and I wanted to know...
April 11, 2025
Essential for anyone interested in experimental fiction. CBR's playful genius and ingenuity more than reward any persevering reader.
Out and Such are fabulous, Between is The nouveau roman nonpareil, and Thru is an entity that embodies post-structuralist theory more intelligibly than any strictly philosophical explanation is able.
Out and Such are fabulous, Between is The nouveau roman nonpareil, and Thru is an entity that embodies post-structuralist theory more intelligibly than any strictly philosophical explanation is able.
January 17, 2008
Out of the four, I read Thru. The reading itself required quite a bit of work and play, but it changed the experience of the text itself. I'm still quite interested in Brooke-Rose's project and hope to read the remaining novels in the future.
August 21, 2012
Rivetting.
March 22, 2018
This is an engrossing thicket of reading most rewarding when plowing through it.
December 8, 2014
Finished Out; will probably be back for the rest!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews