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, tastes and smells, her mother, an absent father, a gradual transformation into adulthood. The facts are simple enough: birth in Geneva; a 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 the 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 durable forms underlying the wayward impulses and passions of the subject. "Remake" is a work of fascinating originality by one of our finest modern novelists.
- ISBN13 9781857542226
- Publish Date 29 February 1996
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 22 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
- Format Paperback
- Pages 160
- Language English