In a Hotel Garden

In a Hotel Garden is a provocative work by the English novelist once described by Sir Frank Kermode as “an admirable and rare example of the writer-critic.” It is a captivating novella, written almost entirely in dialogue. In a Hotel Garden unfolds character and meaning with a lovely, meditative tension. The narrator Ben relates to his friends his enthralling encounter with a Jewish woman in the Dolomite Alps. The tale of her compulsive visit to a hotel garden in Siena––where her grandmother fell in love with a man soon to be a victim of the Holocaust––illuminates Ben’s half-lived life, and raises the question of how we can ever come to terms with the destruction of the European Jews in our century. The Independent in England (where this novel first appeared) said, “Its [the novel’s] enigmas are those of life itself, and Josipovici sets them before us with clarity, tact and compassion.”