Tag: Gabriel Josipovici

Everything Passes by Gabriel Josipovici

A room.
He stands at the window.
And a voice says: Everything passes. The
good and the bad. The joy and the sorrow.
Everything passes.

Josipovici is the only writer on this list I’ve known personally, and I think one of our finest living novelists and critics. In this short fragmentary novel literature opens itself in the smallest of spaces. Narrative is exposed, stripped bare, in a way quite different to Beckett. It has an austerity and development of tonal and sentence patterns that draws from music as much as poetry, leaving any consistent narrative elusive. It works in the little shadow that writing opens, where life shows itself to us, life and the passing time that will eventually take us from it.

Published by Carcanet, 2006

‘He Contemplates a Photograph in a Newspaper’ by Gabriel Josipovici

A very short story about an encounter with an image of a woman, and the viewer/narrator’s gradually accruing response.

A close reading of a newspaper photograph in which the young woman stands in a wood, side on, by a large tree. Her hair obscures her features. Sunlight plays on her back. Beauty amid peace and silence, that’s his impression.

He notices the nearest hand is clenched like a fist. And that her heels are a little higher than her toes.

He looks at the leaves beneath her feet. She doesn’t appear to be standing on them, she isn’t standing on them, there’s a gap between her feet and the leaves.

“Suddenly, sickeningly, he understands what it is he is looking at. The woman is not standing at all.”

Sunlight has bleached out the rope. The profusion of hair hides a noose. He reads the caption. It tells him she’s a refugee who hanged herself after Serbian forces stormed Srebrenica.

The photograph, as it turns out, is a record of a body without pain, without pleasure, a corpse.

I have recalled this text during every war since I first read it almost fourteen years ago. So I have recalled and read it often, far too often. Focussed, concise, and tragically perennial.

First published in Heart’s Wings and Other Stories, Carcanet 2010