Gabriel Josipovici's '100 Days'

Recently I read, and wrote about, Gabriel Josipovici’s Hamlet Fold on Fold, a commentary on that most complicated of plays that is consistently interesting, accessible and thoughtful.

In 2020 Josipovici started a ‘lockdown project’, like so many others early in the pandemic. No sourdough bread here, though: 100 Days is essentially a diary interwoven with personal and intellectual essays. As the first sentence puts it:

When I learned that we were going into lockdown I decided I mustn’t fritter away the unexpected gift of a bracket round life which the virus had imposed on us.

So he simply started writing pieces prompted by the letters of the alphabet, in order: Aachen (Robert Browning’s ‘rather bad poem’ ‘How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’) to Zoos (Cairo, and his early life there with his mother). Interspersed with these essays are daily diary entries, very different in texture as they respond to the immediate media news (Boris Johnson’s incompetence, the reported ‘numbers’, the relieving walks with his partner in the fresh air during those early sunny days).

This is a form of autobiography, certainly an intellectual one, not complete or comprehensive, but always readable, as Josipovici’s mind ranges far and wide while he is physically restricted, as we all were. As in Hamlet Fold on Fold, accessing such a nimble, interesting and interested mind is a pleasure.