Moo Pak Book

 'This is the istry of Moo Pak,' writes a schoolboy, struggling with hisassignment as he sits in the Great Hall of Moor Park, now a secondaryschool. Once the home of Sir William Temple, here Swift wrote the Tale ofthe Tub and tutored the nine-year-old Stella. Later the building was alunatic asylum, a college of theology, a code-breaking centre (during WorldWar II), and an institute for the study of primate behaviour.So Jack Toledano, a Sephardic Jew from Egypt and ex-Universitylecturer in English, tells his friend Damien Anderson in the course ofinnumerable walks through the parks and waterways of London during the1980s. Toledano is writing a history of Moor Park which is also a historyof himself and his times, of the Jews and the English. Moo Pak unfolds thathistory in an eloquent and breathless sweep, as Anderson strives to recordwhat Toledano says and what he knows of his friend, a sweep that takes inman's relation to the great apes, the nature of language, Classicism andRomanticism, Swift, Pope, madness, despair and death.    Moo Pak is a palimpsest not only of themes that have preoccupiedGabriel Josipovici in the past twenty-five years but of our civilisationitself, its dreams, achievements and repressions. And it is a simple,moving tale of friendship and its aftermath.Read More