In a hotel garden - Gabriel Josipovici

In a Hotel Garden is the strangest and most enigmatic of Gabriel Josipovici's many strange and enigmatic novels. On the surface it is a simple story of the growing obsession of a young Englishman for a Jewish woman he meets on holiday. Gradually it reveals itself as an exploration of the power of memory and imagination, also raising the question of how far it is possible for non-Jews to understand Jews, however intrigued by them they may be. In a haunting play of echoes the novel presents us not with one hotel garden but two, embedded respectively in the stony landscape of Tuscany and also the forested mountains of Alto Adige; not one story of erotic obsession but two, one played out in Italy in the 1920s, the other in present-day London- as though, while the characters search desperately for singularity, the world provides them only with doubles. Behind the story looms the destruction of the Jews of Europe: can we ever come to terms with this in ways which are not sentimental or false?

Here what has been implicit in Josipovici 's earliest fiction becomes explicit; the writing takes on a new dimension, most notably in the description of the great walk over the mountain in the Dolimites which forms the mysterious centre of this remarkable book.