Textermination

Brooke-Rose Christine

"...so that Emma found, on being escorted and followed into the second carriage by Mr Elton, that the door was to be lawfully shut on them, and that they were to have a tete-a-tete drive..."

But which Emma? Jane Austen's or Flaubert's? Christine Brooke-Rose's savagely comic novel-of-novels Textermination takes place at a conference not of academics but of characters out of great works of literature. They convene at the San Francisco Hilton to seminar and pray-pray for their continued survival in readers' minds. Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn, characters from "The Satanic Verses" who cause security problems, characters so minor that they are guttering out, all clamber for attention.

What begins as an orderly exercise devolves into spectacular pandemonium as characters from various cultures, times and genres are swept into the political and academic conflicts of our day.

About the Author

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father and American-Swiss mother. She was brought up mainly in Brussels, and educated there, at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London.

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