SOURCE: Josipovici, Gabriel. “World within Word.” New Statesman and Society 9, no. 393 (8 March 1996): 41-2.

In the following review, Josipovici posits that Brooke-Rose's central theme in her memoir Remake is the impossibility of representing one's life in the form of a story.

No writer who has any sense of tradition can help but be more self-conscious today. They will be more aware of fiction as a process of making rather than story-telling, of the falsity of the notion of the self as a unified whole, and less willing than 19th-century predecessors to draw on the life for the substance of the work. In some writers, however, this has left a yearning for a space where the past could be examined and, if possible, come to terms with. Thus Vladimir Nabokov, despite his ironic dismissals of Freud, produced the memoir Speak, Memory. Thus Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, two of the...