Partita and A Winter in Zurau

In "Partita", Gabriel Josipovici's precipitate novel, Michael Penderecki is in flight. Someone has threatened to kill him. He is surrounded by sinister questions. Who is the woman dead in the bathtub? Is she really dead? Why does the voice of Yves Montand singing "Les Feuilles d'Automne" emerge from the horn of an antique phonograph in an otherwise silent room in a villa in Sils Maria? Why are the sentences so short and the movement so fast? Josipovici's most melodramatic and enigmatic fiction to date, "Partita" is as though one of Magritte's paintings had come to life to the rhythms of a Bach partita.In the longer piece, "A Winter in Zurau", the protagonist is also in flight: Franz Kafka, diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, in his thirtyfourth year, escapes from Prague to his sister's smallholding in Upper Bohemia. He leaves behind, he hopes, a dreaded office job, a domineering father, his fiancee Felice and any thoughts of marriage, and the hothouse literary culture of his native city. Free of that, he hopes finally to make sense of his life and his strange compulsion to write stories which, he knows, will bring him neither fame nor financial reward. This is not conventional fiction; it is a critical, biographical inquiry into eight crucial months in Kafka's life, months of anguish and reflection that resulted in the famous Aphorisms.