Taking his cue from an anecdote connected with Bach's late masterpiece, the Goldberg Variations, Gabriel Josipovici imagines an English Writer at the turn of the eighteenth century, a Jew who is invited to the house of a country gentleman in order to read to him in the evening and send him to sleep. The thirty 'Variations' can be read as disconnected stories on varied topics -- incest in the Orkneys, madness in Chester, a poetic competition at the court of George III, a marital quarrel -- or as a weaving together of past and present until a bizarre climax in achieved
