Interesing man – a profile in The Forward:
Josipovici knew early on that he wanted to write. Throughout his career, he explained, he has followed his instinct rather than any overriding philosophy of art: “I don’t know if what I write are novels, and names don’t seem to matter. I quicken at the apprehension of some human drama that is affected by time, and feel the need to find words for what would otherwise remain wordless. I read more poetry than fiction — so it must speak more deeply to me. Yet when I read fiction that stirs me, it really stirs me. It makes me want to write myself, whereas I have never wanted to write poetry. So there must be things fiction can do that poetry can’t.” He elaborated: “This has something to do with time, with how human beings respond to time, with what time does to us, the losses it brings, and the sense of possibilities unrealized, but also the Proustian sense of sudden loops in time and the way our lives are sealed off to us but suddenly, in time, open up momentarily.”
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Nor do his books provide the comfortable satisfactions of denouement. Asked about the difference between plot, story and narrative, Josipovici acknowledges that he deals in the third: “Plot is not really my thing. Stories have a linear progression. My fiction is more like a clearing in the forest, a patch of clarity.” If one can discern a philosophy behind this, it is a desire to serve truth through art rather than reshaping life artificially in order to lend it meaning. “I think the fiction — indeed the art — I like is that which reaches out toward meaning but accepts that in the end, it will always slip out of our grasp or turn out to be an illusion,” he said. “Even Dante is so moving to me, precisely because no final meaning is spelled out, but only — as in Proust — at the end, the sense that now he is ready to begin!”
