SOURCE: “Fractured Glasswork,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 8, 1991, p. 19.

In the following positive review, Cardinal explains the historical events on which Josipovici built his novel The Big Glass.

Reminiscing in 1946 about the origins of his masterwork “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even,” (commonly known as “The Large Glass”), Marcel Duchamp acknowledged the inspiration of Raymond Roussel, whose curious play Impressions d'Afrique he had seen performed in 1911. “The Large Glass,” that legendary synthesis of calculation and Dada nonsense, begun in New York in 1915 and “definitively incompleted” in 1923, may thus be supposed to draw at least in part on the principle of transposition d'art. “I felt,” Duchamp recalls, “that as a painter it was much better to be influenced by a writer than by another painter.”

Gabriel Josipovici's novel [The Big Glass] turns a neat mirrortrick by carrying “The Large Glass” back into the verbal medium, thereby continuing...