Vivian Gornick

Unfinished Business

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I sometimes think I was born reading … I can't remember the time when I didn't have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me.

A celebration of passionate reading from the acclaimed author and critic

In nine stunning essays, the inimitable Vivian Gornick returns to the books that have shaped her. From a reporter in 1970s New York, to a feminist negotiating love and independence, to a writer in the jubilant sanctity of older age: Gornick’s life is compelling, and in the characters of literature she finds versions of herself through the years, each time she opens the page.

Gornick finds solace in the contradictory figures of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette, and reflects on Marguerite Duras’s The Lover; she revisits Great War novels by J.L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity in Elizabeth Bowen, and soaks in Natalia Ginzberg, ‘whose work … made me love life more’. When two erratic, highly strung cats enter her life, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats.

Infused with Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, this collection is a masterful appreciation of literature and its ability to illuminate.

‘Literature knows few champions as ardent or insightful — or as uncompromising — which is to readers’ good fortune.’ —Kirkus
This book is currently unavailable
142 printed pages
Original publication
2020
Publication year
2020
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Quotes

  • Sandra Viviana Chisaca Leivahas quoted2 years ago
    Lately, I’ve found myself thinking about this large body of work written by Americans for whom Jewishness was central, and wondering how well it actually has transformed testament into a literature that will last. What, after all, can the ultimate achievement be of a body of prose riddled through with an anxiety that is nonstop complaint, an irony that barely masks supplication, and the kind of satire that deprives all but the narrator of empathy? How deep can it go, how far can it reach, how long endure
  • Sandra Viviana Chisaca Leivahas quoted2 years ago
    Anomie and desire: a specialty in French literature that can be traced back at least as far as the 1792 publication of Les Liasons Dangereuses and carried forward at least as far as the mid-twentieth-century work of Marguerite Duras. For, after all, what is the work of Marguerite Duras if not an ongoing study of desire linked intimately to self-estrangement? With one important complication: as Duras is writing well into the Freudian century, it was impossible for her to not trace the origins of emotional disconnect to the family romance gone viciously wrong.
  • Sandra Viviana Chisaca Leivahas quoted2 years ago
    Much as she wishes to be “free,” and much as she associates freedom with work, Renée’s resolve is repeatedly undermined by her conflicted desire for love. Struggle as she may, Colette is saying, a woman is always torn between the longing for independence and the even greater longing for passion. This is the dilemma that commands Renée’s real attention. Love has come, and love has gone: she knows its pleasures and its pains inside out. Should it come again, she muses repeatedly, will she give in to the siren song or will she resist it? She thinks about the emotional slavery that accompanies desire: the longings, the anxieties, the potential for humiliation. Still, the lure is powerful. The war within provides the excitement of transgression.
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