In Brooke-Rose’s novels, fiction is continually put forward as that which is essentially unreliable and yet essentially human.
Christine Brooke-Rose (1923-2012 ) was born in Switzerland and was educated at Somerville College in Oxford and University College London. She taught at the University of Paris from 1968 to 1988 and now lives in the south of France. She is the author of many novels, a book of stories, and books of criticism.
In Textermination, the eminent British novelist/critic Christine Brooke-Rose pulls a wide array of characters out of the great works of literature and drops them into the middle of the San Francisco Hilton. Emma Bovary, Emma Woodhouse, Captain Ahab, Odysseus, Huck Finn… all are gathered to meet, to discuss, to pray for their continued existence in the mind of the modern reader. But what begins as a grand enterprise erupts into total pandemonium: with characters from different times, places, and genres all battling for respect and asserting their own hard-won fame and reputations. Dealing with such topical literary issues as deconstruction, multiculturalism, and the Salman Rushdie affair, this wild and humorous satire pokes fun at the academy and ultimately brings into question the value of determining a literary canon at all.
In Brooke-Rose’s novels, fiction is continually put forward as that which is essentially unreliable and yet essentially human.
If we are ever to experience in English the serious practice of narrative as the French have developed it over the last few years, we shall have to reckon with Christine Brooke-Rose.
