SOURCE: Walters, Michael. “A Beautiful Algebra of a Life.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4857 (3 May 1996): 22.

In the following review, Walters describes Remake as “at once a kind of meta-autobiography, a meditation on memory … and a narrative of formal scrupulousness and lyrical grace.”

The grammar of autobiography can unsettle its author; scarcely four pages into La vie de Henry Brulard, the multi-pseudonymous Stendhal was deploring “cette effroyable quantité de Je et Moi”. Like Stendhal, Christine Brooke-Rose faces the problem of “self-confrontation” early on. “The confronter is a speek in time compared to the army of confrontable selves”, declares the narrator of Remake, alert to the faulty reconnaissance of pronouns, whose “substitution” and “simulation” misrepresent the variable memory. Brooke-Rose's autobiographical novel eschews such duplicitous aid almost entirely, allowing the pronoun to shape only one chapter, a “diary” incorporating the last illness and death of the narrator's mother. For the greater part...