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Life, End of

Christine Brooke-Rose

Cover Picture of Life, End of
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Categories: 21st Century, British, Women
Imprint: Carcanet Fiction
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE!
(Pub. Jul 2012)
9781847775726
£14.95 £13.45
Paperback (124 pages)
(Pub. Feb 2006)
9781857548464
£14.95 £13.45
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  • 'It is the brain, it is the brain endures, yet even the pain from that misquote floods the mind. Which also shrinks and dies. As Eve falls.
        The immediate environment always shrinks, from house to flat to room to bed to coffin to earthworm - turns then grows again to compost to earth to planet to universe.
        Even language dies, like their speakers, thousands per century...
    It is the brain, it is the brain endures.'
    from Chapter 1

    She is eighty. Facing death, she considers her experiments with narrative, and with the narrative of her life. What is the purpose of the narrative she is creating here, and what the purpose of the life that lives it in the writing? At the centre of Life, End of, in a mock-technical lecture from the Character to the Author, she comes to accept that her experiments in narrative are like life: the narrative creates itself.

    Christine Brooke-Rose's last novel is a darkly comic exploration of the meanings and non-meanings to which, in the end, life and art lead us.
    Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Christine Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father and American-Swiss mother. She was brought up mainly in Brussels, and educated there, at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London. ... read more
    Praise for Christine Brooke-Rose 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
    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
    Out represents quite a new departure in Miss Brooke-Rose's work... a splendid achievement...
    Isobel English
    Such is a runaway success for her original technique... funny, painful, exciting, haunting...
    Elizabeth Smart
    Her finest novel completely succeeds because subject and language are one.
    Angus Wilson on Between
    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
    Out represents quite a new departure in Miss Brooke-Rose's work... a splendid achievement...
    Isobel English
    Such is a runaway success for her original technique... funny, painful, exciting, haunting...
    Elizabeth Smart
    Her finest novel completely succeeds because subject and language are one.
    Angus Wilson on Between
    Her finest novel completely succeeds because subject and language are one.
    Angus Wilson on Between
    Such is a runaway success for her original technique... funny, painful, exciting, haunting...
    Elizabeth Smart
    Out represents quite a new departure in Miss Brooke-Rose's work... a splendid achievement...
    Isobel English
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