Forgetting

Josipovici Gabriel

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 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.

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 sixteen 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) and "Heart's Wings" (Carcanet, 2010).

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