SOURCE: “Tactile Yearnings,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 11, 1997, p. 24.

In the following review, Cardinal offers a mixed assessment of Touch, noting the uneven qualities in the essays.

Gabriel Josipovici once averred that “one writes what one would like to read but cannot find written by anyone else.” An experimental novelist, playwright and literary critic of distinction, he adopts here the relaxed tone of one sitting in an armchair at home. In terms of genre, the two dozen short chapters of Touch are less a well-tempered suite of essays à la Montaigne and more a carnet intime, in which pronouncements on culture or the human condition are strewn amid personal jottings and household trivia. As a guided tour to Josipovici's sensibility, the book remains unemphatic and sometimes a little wan; yet it may be that its absence of stress corresponds to a strategy for teasing out a particular vein of...