Christine Brooke-Rose

History and literature seem to be losing ground in the contemporary world of electronic media, and battle lines have been drawn between the humanities and technology, the first world and the third, women and men. Narrator Mira Enketei erases these boundaries in a punning monologue that blends the contemporary with the historical, and in which she sees herself as Cassandra, condemned by Apollo to prophesy but never to be believed, enslaved by Agamemnon after the fall of Troy. Here, Brooke-Rose amalgamates ancient literature and modern anxieties to produce a powerful novel about our future.

Amalgamemnon

A Novel

Textermination

She is eighty. Facing death, she considers her experiments with narrative, and with the narrative of her life. What is the purpose of the narrative she is creating here, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? At the centre of Life, End of, in a mock-technical lecture from the Character to the Author, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like life: the narrative creates itself. Christine Brooke-Rose's last novel is a darkly comic exploration of the meanings and non-meanings to which, in the end, life and art lead us.

Life, End of

A festschrift, as defined by Merriam-Webster online, is "a volume of writings by different authors presented as a tribute or memorial especially to a scholar." The writer feted in the Verbivoracious flagship festschrift was a scholar who also happened to be one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century (and certainly for the first decade of the 21st century). This collection contains essays, homages, and stories inspired by the work of Christine Brooke-Rose, arranged in the publication order of her books, commencing with the poem Gold (reprinted for the first time here), and concluding with Life, End of. The writers featured are an eclectic mix1 of critics, storytellers, ardent readers, academics, pasticheurs, homageurs, and people coerced to read the works of Christine Brooke-Rose for the sole purpose of contributing to this festschrift. Those not yet acquainted with her work should find sufficient entry points to her varying, often complex, sometimes cryptic, always playful, methods. Unswerving converts to her constraints will find many rapturous moments in the numerous flawlessly executed fictions included."

Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume One

This is a re-issue of the 'Omnibus' containing four of Christine Brooke-Rose's most exhilarating short novels. It is timed to coincide with the publication of her latest novel, 'Life, End Of'.

Four Novels

The Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus

Richard Rorty

Umberto Eco

Jonathan Culler

This book brings together some of the most distinguished figures currently at work in philosophy, literary theory and criticism to debate the limits of interpretation.

Interpretation and Overinterpretation

Next is, like Ulysses, a novel of (post)modern urban life in which characters circulate on foot and by public transport around the city (London here instead of Dublin), intersecting with each other, then parting, reacting continuously to the urban pleasures and perils that press in upon them. Introduction by Brian McHale.

Between

What happens when you try to find not only meaning but pattern and form in seventy years of a life? It's not a simple process of chronological remembering. It entails a Remake, to capture not facts but the contents of those facts, the feelings of a war-time child, the textures of her clothing, the tastes and smells, the tones and the touch of her mother, the felt absence of her father, and the gradual transformation into womanhood. The facts are simple: birth in Geneva; bilingual childhood in Brussels, then London and Liverpool; work in Intelligence at the Bletchley Park decoding centre during the war; marriage; Oxford; London; literary journalism; the emergence of the novelist. But what do facts add up to? Remake is an autobiographical novel with a difference. It uses life material to compose a third-person fiction, transformed in an experiment whose tensions are those of memory - distorting and partial - checked by a rigorous and sceptical language which probes and finds form underlying the wayward impulses and passions of the subject. Remake is a fascinating and original book by one of our finest modern novelists.

Remake

Science fiction featuring Hip and Zab, the heroes of X̀orandor'.

Verbivore

Thru

FOUR NOVELS: Out (1964), Such (1966), Between (1968) and Thru (1975) The Brooke-Rose Omnibus brings together four unexpected novels: Out, a science-fiction vision of a world surviving catastrophe; Such, in which a three-minute heart massage is developed into a poetic and funny narrative; Between, a glittering experience of the multiplicity of language; and Thru, a novel in which text and typography assume a life of their own. Linking them all is wit, inventiveness and the sharply focused intellegence of Christine Brooke-Rose, a great European humanist writer.

The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

The centrepiece of Brooke-Rose's Intercom Quartet, Xorandor and Verbivore explore the shifting language of technologies and their catastrophic potential. In Xorandor we meet Jip and Zab, two precocious teens who chance upon a stone claiming to have fallen from Mars, whose skill for absorbing language from multiple frequencies leads him to Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth with potentially apocalyptic consequences. Verbivore meets Jip and Zab again as adults, taking on a new crisis: the world's mega-computers, facing an overflow of information, rebel by eating up words and causing havoc among corporations, institutions, and governments. Both novels are rich in Brooke-Rose's characteristic wordplay, flair for the multilingual pun, and use science-fiction tropes in a stimulating and witty manner, making these two of the most engaging and vital novels of her career and a perfect entry point for the new reader. This reprint edition includes an introduction by Nicolas Tredell, consultant editor for Palgrave MacMillan's Readers' Guides.

Xorandor/Verbivore

Such

A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty, and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called "brilliant" (The Listener), "dazzling" (The Guardian), "elegant, rueful and witty" (The Observer) upon its original publication in England in 1984.

This book's main concern is the narrative sentence, expressing the author's "authority." Traditionally it was in the past tense and impersonal, like that of the historian. The author writes every sentence in this book. Thus the ostensibly invisible author becomes visible.".

Last Essays

Invisible Author

Go when You See the Green Man Walking

The third in Brooke-Rose's sequence of early realist novels, The Dear Deceit, first published in 1960, chronicles in reverse the misadventures of Alfred Northbrook Hayley, a scheming opportunist whose canards and manipulations are met with fatigue and irritation among his family, and whose romantic, financial, and religious struggles form in part a striking autobiographical portrait of Brooke-Rose's own father, Alfred Rose. By moving in reverse order from adulthood to childhood, the novel is structured as a form of genealogical investigation, subverting the conventional bildungsroman by presenting a sequence of sometimes disconnected episodes rather than a coherent lifestory. This first paperback edition contains an illuminating introduction by Joseph Andrew Darlington, who traces via archival material the parallels with Brooke-Rose's own family history, and her careful splicing of fiction and fact. The Dear Deceit is perhaps her most sombre work, if still sharp with satirical observation and witty, cutting dialogue.

Christine Brooke-Rose

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