Life, End of - Softcover

Brooke-Rose, Christine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1857548469 ISBN 13: 9781857548464

Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2006

Synopsis

She is eighty. Facing death, she becomes 'a cruising mind', lost in sequences of unabstract comic detail, in - as the title implies - a kind of index, rigid, arbitrary, pointing backwards into the lived text. The head top leans against the bathroom mirror so that the looking glass becomes a feeling glass. She is getting worse day by day, and yet she goes on, deeper into meaning, into non-meaning, with a kind of wry eagerness. She is not disappointed with her life. In order to distract herself, to place herself, she attends to what the media say about the world as if what they say was actually the world. She reflects on her own career, on her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she is writing here: therapy, fun, but anything else, anything more? What is its purpose, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? She discovers how, as in fiction, as in any form of experiment, the difficulty for the handicapped is less the handicap than other people, and they too have their lives and handicaps. She becomes like them, she becomes one of them, an other person.Reasserting herself, at the centre of the book, in a mock-technical lecture from a character to an author who is not interested, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like pain-killers, and that they no longer matter, like life.

About this title

Review:

"B. S. Johnson claimed her as a soulmate; the French nouveaux romanciers begged her to join their cliques." --The Independent on Christine Brooke-Rose

About the Author:

Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London. She taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and now lives in the south of France. Carcanet publish her novels Amalgamemnon, Xorandor, Verbivore and Textermination and her earlier novels Out, Such, Between and Thru in the Brooke-Rose Omnibus. Also available is her autobiographical work, Remake (1996).

About this edition

• Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1857548469
• ISBN 13: 9781857548464
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 124