Legend has it that, in 1741, Bach received a commission from Count von Keyserlingk, a former Russian ambassador to the court of Saxony. The count was an insomniac, and requested a work that would succour him during the endless black hours of sleeplessness.
Allegedly played for the count by his then protégé and Bach's pupil, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, the variations on an aria from Bach's second Anna Magdalena Notebook drew their name from their performer.
The literary critic, novelist and scholar Gabriel Josipovici took this as inspiration and framework for his novel, Goldberg: Variations. Currently professor of English at the University of Sussex, Josipovici comes from multi-cultural stock. He was born in Nice in 1940 to Sacha Rabinovitch and Jean Josipovici, Arabic-speaking Jews who had previously been living in Egypt. They had moved to France in the 1930s, but ended up suffering under the anti-Semitism of the age. After his father and mother drifted apart, Josipovici survived the war with his mother, and they returned to Egypt afterward, remaining there until 1956, when he took up his studies at Oxford.
With Goldberg: Variations, Josipovici harks back to the response criticism of the 1970s and his own work The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Book. The "narrative" plays cat-and-mouse with the reader up to 'The Final Fugue', chapter 30 - the same number of variations as in Bach's oeuvre. Goldberg, a Jew invited to the country manor of a gentleman, Tobias Westfield, who suffers from insomnia of the most intractable kind - philosophical doubt - has been engaged to read to Westfield to help him to sleep. Complicating things, Westfield asks Goldberg to read his own compositions. What emerges is a roulette of odd stories focusing in and out of Westfield's and Goldberg's past, their separate family and friends - and a 20th-century writer, the fictional author of this novel, who appears abruptly in the middle of the book, after cryptic forebodings grafted in between the other anecdotes. His obsession with Paul Klee's Wander-Artist (Ein Plakat) ultimately links the disjointed elements and provides a key to one of the novel's many meanings.
As a whole, this book works something like a bad night's sleep: confused, often surreal images and imagined conversations churning through the half dormant, half wakeful mind. It reaches a crisis, rounds it and arrives at salvation toward the end, but in the precise, surgical manner of scholars who spend a great deal, perhaps too much, time with literary theory and criticism - almost as though Josipovici, wishing to share with us his inner life, had cleanly opened his arm with a scalpel, identified the layers of skin, tissue, blood and lymph systems, muscle, sinew and bone, then neatly and efficiently sewn it all back up again.
Harking back to Josipovici's academic work, Goldberg: Variations is at once the reader, the writer and the book. The elegantly traced labyrinth of the narrative plaits all three into one. In forcing the reader to focus on each element, Josipovici welds reader, writer and text back together again into a new unit: his novel. Although neither a cathartic experience nor an emotional journey - although rendering the frequent thoughtful despair of its characters - Josipovici's book provides an intellectual pleasure much the same as a carefully plotted game of chess on a long winter's night.
Christine Madden is a journalist and critic
Goldberg: Variations. By Gabriel Josipovici. Carcanet Press, 190 pp. £9.95