Bookforum on Gabriel Josipovici’s Goldberg: Variations

I’m a little biased on this one for ‘I-acquired-the-book-for-Harper-Perennial’ related reasons, but you have to read Goldberg: Variations.

Josipovici is an amazing writer and he has a bunch of great books— Moo Pak; Contre-Jour; his most recent collection of critical essays, Singer on the Shore; to name just a few — that should jump to the top of your reading list straight away. I’m serious.

Bach’s composition has earned its own list of variations (not least, Glenn Gould’s famous recording, recently digitized for a player piano; a Jerome Robbins ballet; and Richard Powers’s novel The Gold Bug Variations). Yet Josipovici has done something delightfully daring for his homage: With the trick of a colon, his rendition proposes variations on Goldberg himself. The novel’s setting is not Germany but nineteenth-century England; the insomniac is not a count but a wealthy aristocrat unmoved by music; and Goldberg, here named Samuel, is not a musician but a storyteller—a Scheherazade plagued with writer’s block for whom Queneau-esque variations are the only solution.