100 Days

by Gabriel Josipovici

When, in March 2020, the Covid pandemic led the Government to impose a total lockdown on ordinary life, Gabriel Josipovici began to write a diary tracing his life under the new dispensation. 100 Days responds to the escalating crisis, as well as to the arrival of Spring and then of Summer on the South Downs, but it is mainly concerned with a kind of accounting. Characteristically inventive, Josipovici chooses the ABC as a prospecting implement to stimulate reflection on subjects that run from Aachen to Alexandria, from Berio to the Border Ballads, from Zazie dans le metro to Zoos. Previously, he reminds us, he has 'plundered episodes in my life to illustrate the intertwining of memory and forgetting, the desire to remember and the need to forget.' 'Elly said to me after reading my recent book Forgetting,' he goes on, '"You don't seem to be afraid of revealing a great deal about yourself." But I don't think I feel it that way. I can "reveal" precisely because it does not seem to be part of me, it seems to belong to someone else, a writer I have lived with, an immigrant I have known.' Josipovici's book, more than a meditation on a hundred days of the pandemic, is a reckoning with one writer's life, with his life's work and with his readers.

Genres: Essays

385 pages, Paperback

Published October 28, 2021

About the author

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 seventeen 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. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are Two Novels: 'After' and 'Making Mistakes' (Carcanet), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press), Heart's Wings (Carcanet, 2010) and Infinity (Carcanet, 2012).

Reviews

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Why have I always had such an aversion to first person narratives? I think precisely because of their dishonesty -- they start from a falsehood and can never recover. The falsehood that 'I' can talk in such detail and so smoothly about what has 'happened' to 'me', or even, sometimes, what is actually happening as 'I' write." (from "I, You, He")

That passage is on page 245. By now we are well into Gabriel Josipovici's 100 Days, a journal from winter-summer 2020 of the pandemic seen, read, and heard about by a first person narrator living in lewes, england. Each alphabetical entry (from A to Z but without Q or X [such missed opportunities!]) is prefaced by the date, a snippet of COVID-19 news (always bad), and a weather and walking report. The bulk of the text consists of mini-memoirs on topics like Zazie dans le métro, Wise Women, Plays, Grandparents, and Bicycles. As usual with Josipovici's fiction and non-fiction, his mind at work is the most attractive thing. Personally, it would be harder for me to care less about grandparents, but I do want to see what he makes of them. Assuming there are no falsehoods about that.

We are always in the mind-set that produced the novels like Infinity or Everything Passes where what we assume might be 'real' or 'truth' turns out to be something else, so we need to regard seemingly frank entries with attention. For instance, under "Happiness" Josipovici writes:

"The pursuit of happiness is surely a recipe for unhappiness. Happiness, in my experience, comes to you unexpectedly or not at all." Fair enough. Then he adds: "Though, come to think of it, can I recall any such moments?... Perhaps I simply don't have anything to compare it with and so don't know what it means." He then says he understands "joy a bit better, at least when Dante or Proust talk about it. Indeed, the fact that joy is so central to both their works is part of what makes me love them so much." Note the understanding, then a slight backing away from allying himself with that feeling by invoking the joy he finds in literature alone, and even then in rarefied instances, before ending with an appreciation for that element present in those works, but with no examples drawn from life. The next day's entry (May 18, 2020) reads:

"What has been so wonderful about the last two months alone with T is that my natural desire for isolation, for time and space to work things out for myself, has not had to fight against the push of society, the multiple things that usually have to be done (though I'm good at avoiding most of them). The last two months have been special and it's sad to see this start to disappear." (As Johnson's government lifts restrictions.)

That passage strikes me as embodying happiness. Maybe joy. So, interrogate the narrator here as you would the characters in his fictions.

100 Days often talks about Josipovici's books and plays (radio and stage). As such, someone reading this book without knowledge of his body of work that extends from the late 1960s to today will miss some things. But you don't need that context to enjoy his entries on Animals (family pets) or succinct sketches of how he thinks about writing. There are occasional mystifying sentences that revolve around friends who he knows but who we won't. (This is like Christopher Sorrentino's Now Beacon, Now Sea, where it's assumed the geography of new york city is familiar to everyone, as if every reader in the world has visited/lived there.) A biographical glossary in the back would have helped, as would better proofreading (words are repeated right after each other, words have letters dropped out so "the" becomes "he," more times than you'd expect from Carcanet). Despite those quibbles, what started as an exercise or a test of skill and memory becomes, as the pages go on, something more engaging for interested readers. Josipovici rarely writes a duff sentence. Indeed, he's charming and clear, with emotion and intellect both apparent. Highly recommended.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Long over due review. So here 100 days of essays written during our collective first 100 days of lockdown. Recently about Cohen I said something about how much I enjoy the essaying done by the young talented novelist. This here same thing but on the other end of the life spectrum. Something very calming about the meditations on topics personally vibratory to the author, when the years have softened and sharpened the perspective on things so close.

First half read in one delightful day of reading. The rest drizzled over a week. Copy kindly provide by the pub’er. First by me of an author I will def must read more from.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I had to summarise this book in one word it would probably be self-indulgent. I know, it has a hyphen. The concept of it was very simple, to write something every day for the duration of the COVID lockdown in the UK. Each of those days is filled with two entries. The first is a dated item which comments on the news or events; the weather, the politics or the walk that he has taken on the South Downs. The other entry is some sort of reflection, running in alphabetical order and touching on literature, childhood and life events, authors, plays and all manner of things. There are many reflections on previous books, giving little insights into their genesis or gestation. All of it is interesting, some is fascinating and it comes across as self-indulgent. How could it not, it is all about the author.

I am not saying that I didn’t like it, I really did. But I can see how others may not love it as much as many of his other books. I liked it for the insights into a long life in literature. The autobiographical snatches and the insights into earlier works, only a few of which I have read. Josipovici is a real scholar, and is fluent in a number of languages. Sadly many of his readers will not be so learned and so my only real criticism would be the difficulty that I had when passages were given in French or other languages and had no translation available. I had to let them flutter over my head, meaninglessly.
From the very end of the book I concluded that Josipovici had enjoyed having to write something every day. The pressure to complete a piece, even a small one, before moving on to the next. He says in the final entry:

I have enjoyed it. The excitement of having just one day to formulate a ‘memory’ or ‘thought’ (it has sometimes been difficult to separate the two) has been a joy some days, at others a task carried out through gritted teeth, but always, as the day’s work gets done, leaving me with a pleasant sense of achievement. Not major, but still something.

These thoughts or memories range from Cairo to Crème Caramel, Borges to Duras via Perec. Lots about Egypt, Oxford and growing up. I enjoyed the trip.

There were two things which sustained me on the journey. One was to look back at where we were well over 18 months ago, when the COVID virus was relatively new and unknown, looking back with the benefit of hindsight about how the Government was dealing with the situation and seeing it for what is was, as well as seeing it in the light of more recent events. This is only really relevant if you follow events in the UK and are seeing them in the light of current events, hypocrisy and downright lies. The other more enjoyable part of the journey was to learn with Josipovici – too learn from his long life in literature and also to learn a little more about the inspirations behind some of his earlier books.
With all that in mind, here are a few of my highlights:
Early on there was a chapter about Adjectives (and Adverbs) which was one of the few to dispense actual writing advice. ‘Like me, she thinks adjectives and adverbs are the visible sign of all that is wrong with a novel.’

Novelists like [Iris] Murdoch, which means ninety-nine percent of all the novels published in the world since the war, see it as their task to tell a story, but, no longer in active dialogue with the audience as the traditional storyteller once was, feel they have to ‘see their characters’ and find the words to make the reader see them in turn. They have, they think, to persuade their readers that this is more than a story, it is life itself passing before them. They imagine that the more adjectives and adverbs they use the more the reader will forget that he or she is reading a book and enter the world the writer has conjured up for them. What I find is that exactly the opposite happens to me: the more adjectives and adverbs are used the more I am aware of the writer using words and the less I believe in what he or she is saying.

He goes in to cite a really interesting example of this using the various versions of the fairy tales published by the Brothers Grimm between 1812 and 1857. Using the same story from three different editions of their collection he shows us the subtle changes in language which took the story from simple folk tale to children’s book. Children want story, he concludes, not atmosphere.

In a section called The English Language, Josipovici laments that he is not a native to the language, and by that he gradually discovers that he means a native of English culture to go with the language. He understands why he warms to writers who do not feel themselves to be quite English. ‘…Stoppard too, with Jewish parents and an immigrant background, and of the younger writers like Deborah Levy, brought up in South Africa, and Kirsty Gunn, brought up in New Zealand, both of course growing up with English, but not with England.’ A wonderful turn of phrase.

At one point a friend, the poet Andrew McNeillie, send some verses he had written. I must quote one of these, for no better reason than I love it:

Think what it means to have time on your hands,
Time if not space to dwell, to see
What it means, simply to be
At the beck of no one’s commands,
To be stuck ashore, yet all at sea.
Didn’t you always want to break free?
Haven’t we all heard you cry ‘If only…’
Well, now’s the time to give only a try,
Because only is here and lonely.

In a passage reflecting on his book called The Book of God: a Response to the Bible, we find the following fascinating paragraph:

As I worked on that book I became more and more aware of how the sparseness of the Bible’s narrative style, its reliance on simple statement of fact and dialogue without any attempt to probe the psychology of the characters, was something I was striving for om my own writing and admired in a few modern authors, such as Marguerite Duras and Muriel Spark. Far from this lack of ‘psychologising’ leading to a paucity of psychological understanding it brought out how complex the underlying motives of the characters were and how often they did not themselves understand why they engaged in certain actions or said certain things. Indeed, it suggested that act always comes before thought – something Dostoevsky alone among the major nineteenth-century authors seems instinctively to have understood.

In a passage entitled The Grass, referring to a French book L”Herbe Josipovici refers to how we observe history, or more how we fail to see it happening around us.

We do not see history, though we may see – on TV at least – memorable events such as the shooting of Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the attacks on the Twin Towers. But history, like our lives, moves on invisibly and no one can see it moving, any more than we can see grass grow.

The passage continues to talk about a book called La Route des Flandres by Claude Simon, which draws on the authors experience of being in a cavalry regiment that was overrun by German tanks at the beginning of the Second World War.

Many a film has shown the line of fleeing civilians repeatedly strafed by German planes and many a novel has tried to give an account of those tumultuous days and to give us the feel of what those days were like. But by ‘telling a story’ they smooth things out, drain it of its confusion, because the narrative voice itself remains clear and unconfused. Simon’s account of the overwhelming of the French cavalry by the German panzer divisions is completely different. This is not because it tries to capture the confusion and horror by itself being confused but because it manages to convey in words the terrible lack of words we have to describe such events and the feelings they arouse. The traumatised soldier lying in bed with his lover, who cannot separate in his mind past from present as events reappear in different guises and he needs desperately to speak them, who returns compulsively to that horse gradually becoming one with the mud as he does to pre-war sexual betrayals and moments of sexual bliss, emerges through his repetitions, confusions and moments of lyrical beauty in a way none of the characters of a writer like Irène Némirovsky, dealing with the same subject, ever does. By the time we have finished the novel we have not been told a story, we have experienced something shattering, life-changing.

It is a book and a writer I have never heard of before, but I have ordered a copy of this novel (in translation as The Flanders Road) based solely on those few paragraphs.

One of the other features to emerge is the attack on the British Government’s handling of the COVID crisis, but obviously this was written at the time of ongoing Brexit negotiations. The parallels with current events over the Downing Street party is still echoing in the news, making passages like this even more pertinent:

Who would have thought all the features that characterised the Brexit campaign – the flouting of the rules, the blatant hypocrisy, the ghastly sanctimoniousness, the tarring of all opponents as enemies of the people, the Little Englander mentality, the fetishisation of ‘this island nation’ – that all would survive intact and be on daily show in this government’s handling of a real national crisis, the coronavirus pandemic?

There are so many great stories in this book, making it impossible to do justice to in a review for fear of missing a gem. I am also aware this will not be a book for everyone. It is too riddled with anecdote, aside and self-indulgence for some. I loved it. In the same way that after reading my first book by Gabriel Josipovici I knew at once that here is an author for me and started to order other books by him. I read them at the pace of one a year and still have several unread ones. Allow me one more story to try to capture why I like him so much. One chapter concerns the French writer George Perec. In the 1970s, sitting on the floor at a crowded party in Lewes, Josipovici finds himself talking to a young Frenchwoman who, on hearing he is a writer said that she knew a writer in Paris and would send one of his books. Months later a book arrived with no note or return address. It was called La Disparition. No-one at the party knew who the Frenchwoman was. He started to read the book, which seemed to make no sense. He says to his mother that he is reading a book about twenty-six sons, the fifth of whom is missing. As a lover of crosswords, she said at once it is about the letter e. He looks through the pages, not a single letter e.

As I glanced at the different passages I realised that the quaint style was the result of this lack, for e in French is even more ubiquitous than it is in English – think of et ‘and’, and est, ‘he is’, and all the feminines, so that in order to accommodate an e-less vocabulary you have to perform some strange contortions.

Having done that in French, some poor translator then has to do the same to turn it into English. Is that harder or easier? He goes on to talk about an initial reluctance to buy a copy of Life A User’s Manual, before he realised how charming and wonderful it was, and also how when working in Paris, Josipovici turned down the chance to meet Perec through the friend of a friend. He wrote a fan letter, which he sent via Perec’s publisher, and although he received no direct reply, for several years he did receive a little handprinted booklet from him consisting of various puzzles and word-plays. I just love these little stories.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Beginning in March 2020, Josipovici challenged himself to write a diary entry and mini-essay each day for 100 days – which happened to correspond almost exactly to the length of the UK’s first lockdown. Approaching age 80, he felt the virus had offered “the unexpected gift of a bracket round life” that he “mustn’t fritter away.” He chose an alphabetical framework, stretching from Aachen to Zoos and covering everything from his upbringing in Egypt to his love of walking in the Sussex Downs. I had the feeling that I should have read some of his fiction first so that I could spot how his ideas and experiences had infiltrated it; I’m now rectifying this by reading his novella The Cemetery in Barnes, in which I recognize a late-life remarriage and London versus countryside settings.

Still, I appreciated Josipovici’s thoughts on literature and his own aims for his work (more so than the rehashing of Covid statistics and official briefings from Boris Johnson et al., almost unbearable to encounter again):

In my writing I have always eschewed visual descriptions, perhaps because I don’t have a strong visual memory myself, but actually it is because reading such descriptions in other people’s novels I am instantly bored and feel it is so much dead wood.

nearly all my books and stories try to force the reader (and, I suppose, as I wrote, to force me) to face the strange phenomenon that everything does indeed pass, and that one day, perhaps sooner than most people think, humanity will pass and, eventually, the universe, but that most of the time we live as though all was permanent, including ourselves. What rich soil for the artist!

Why have I always had such an aversion to first person narratives? I think precisely because of their dishonesty – they start from a falsehood and can never recover. The falsehood that ‘I’ can talk in such detail and so smoothly about what has ‘happened’ to ‘me’, or even, sometimes, what is actually happening as ‘I’ write.

You never know till you’ve plunged in just what it is you really want to write. When I started writing The Inventory I had no idea repetition would play such an important role in it. And so it has been all through, right up to The Cemetery in Barnes. If I was a poet I would no doubt use refrains – I love the way the same thing becomes different the second time round

To write a novel in which nothing happens and yet everything happens: a secret dream of mine ever since I began to write

I did sense some misogyny, though, as it’s generally female writers he singles out for criticism: Iris Murdoch is his prime example of the overuse of adjectives and adverbs, he mentions a “dreadful novel” he’s reading by Elizabeth Bowen, and he describes Jean Rhys and Dorothy Whipple as women “who, raised on a diet of the classic English novel, howled with anguish when life did not, for them, turn out as they felt it should.”

While this was enjoyable to flip through, it’s probably more for existing fans than for readers new to the author’s work, and the Covid connection isn’t integral to the writing experiment.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

100 days of diary entries during Covid lockdown with short essays and reflections, autobiographical and literary, by a writer I will read more of.