This short book tells a story without a plot, and yet it entices. Josipovici’s storytelling style is not spectacular; he uses an almost careless, gently rippling tone, and many repetitive elements, but offering a richness that arises from an ingenious play of appearance and reality.
The unnamed narrator is a professional translator, a seemingly phlegmatic man with no remarkable personality, but one obsessed with the tragic verses of Monteverdi's Orfeo and the languorous poetry of Joachim du Bellay. He has settled into a sluggish bourgeois existence, with a lot of attention for the good things in life, but clearly also on the verge of depression or even over it. He is still obsessed with his late first wife, who was everything to him, but who he constantly shadowed when she returned from work and who he did not try to save when she fell into the Thames. And the marriage to his second wife seems perfectly harmonious, but their seemingly polite bickering reveals a yawning chasm between the two.
In other words, Josipovici presents an intriguing game of contradictions, in which he regularly casts doubt on the truthfulness of the above-mentioned elements and refers to the possibility of imaginary lives. He reinforces this by constantly jumping through time and place. Almost imperceptibly, we pass from the protagonist's life with his second wife in a farmhouse in Wales, to his first marriage and residence in London, to his lonely existence in Paris after the death of his first wife. This play with time and place constantly unbalances the reader. On top of that the author regularly repeats the same events and actions, but each time with small variations and an occasional sinister accent, in which death constantly comes into play. Also the male protagonist himself, almost carelessly, introduces these small variations in his story, by regularly repeating the original texts of Monteverdi and du Bellay, but each time translating them slightly differently, shifting the meaning of the verses. In this way, Josipovici seems to ingeniously link modernism and postmodernism, confusing his reader, while at the same time addressing a very rich palette of existential themes. It was my first acquaintance with this author, but it certainly won't be my last. ( )