Review: After & Making mistakes - The Jewish Chronicle

By Gabriel Josipovici
Carcanet, £14.95

Dissatisfaction is a peculiarly middle-class indulgence. A life that from the outside appears perfect — moderate success, sufficient income, a loving family — can from feel from within claustrophobic and merely adequate, plagued by thoughts of the successes unachieved, the ones that got away, and a nagging lack of purpose.

Gabriel Josipovici’s two new novellas — each barely over 130 pages and issued together under one, elegant cover — both deal with this quiet despair of the bourgeoisie.

Despite his reputation for formidable modernist impenetrability, these are effortlessly readable and charming works. They are written almost exclusively in dialogue, frequently of the frothy, cocktail-party sort. Josipovici is especially good not only when gently satirising the self-regard, banality and indirection of such chit-chat, but also in recognising that this is the only way we have of finding out about those we do not know, and unlocking the secrets of those we do.

After concerns Alan, an academic on leave trying to write a book. But he mostly spends his time disconsolately lunching and diffidently flirting with women who aren’t his wife. A small tremor spreads through his life with the arrival of Claude, a woman whom he hasn’t seen since they went out in their university days.

Claude is disquietingly keen to see him, and Alan (whom she insists on calling Alain) is too polite to refuse. It turns out that their relationship had finished abruptly after they were involved in an accident. They continue to meet, and try to reconstruct exactly what happened, though Alan remains perturbed about Claude’s motivation. Is it love? Sex? Revenge?

Josipovici subtly portrays Alan as a man uncertain of how much he has forgotten and how much he has repressed. And he unsparingly shows that even someone who is able to discourse at length (as Alan does) on Rabelais and the rise of printing, can remain tongue-tied about his most personal concerns: a conversation with a rabbi friend in whom Alan tries to confide descends into a frustrated succession of “I’m not sure”, “I don’t know” and “it’s too complicated”. It is brave for a novelist to offer ineloquence so nakedly, but Josipovici deploys it in this haunting novel to superb effect.

Making Mistakes, despite containing the demise of a pair of marriages, has a far more light-hearted tone. In a variation on Così Fan Tutte (though without recourse to Albanian disguises), two best friends dated two sisters at university, though they each ended up marrying the other sister.

Middle age brings its own complications. Charlie cheats on Bea, who cannot bring herself to leave him. Dorothy, who always saw herself as the sensible sister and her marriage to Tony as well-grounded, discovers that he has left her for his secretary because of, as Tony explains, “all the humiliation”.

Their mutual friend Alfonso, who engineered the initial switch, spots an opportunity to put it into reverse. There is of course something artificial about the plotting, which is overly reliant on chance meetings on the Tube and in coffee shops, but that is only to be expected from an operatic plot.

However, Making Mistakes and After are never less than witty and humane about the anxieties that accompany being comfortable.