Remake - Softcover

'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 attend to Christine Brooke-Rose.' - Frank Kermode on Thru 'She is a sublime rollercoaster: hold on and hurtle with her - the ride will be exhilarating.' - Spectator 'We always need to have somebody who is willing to venture into the still vast terra incognita of fiction.' - Sunday Telegraph

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.