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Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
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65/99
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84/99
Volume
19/99
Rating
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About This Book
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick's celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading--and re-reading--as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette's The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras's The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen's prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, "a writer whose work has often made me love life more." After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing's Particularly Cats. Guided by Gornick's trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature's power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who "still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L."
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Reviews
"A delightful entry for lovers of literature and literary criticism."
"The essays in Unfinished Business are hybrid forms in which literary analysis, close reading, personal narrative, anecdotal aside, and sudden revelation alternate and combine."
"Some may feel she has a tendency to overdramatize, but none will question her intellectual honesty ..."
"steady, sculpted prose and elegant readings ..."
"our interest in Unfinished Business lies less in her hypotheses and conclusions than it does in her process of evaluating and reevaluating books, and consequently in the sort of woman Gornick believes herself to be and to have been through the successive stages of her life."
"literary cognoscente will appreciate Vivian Gornick's brilliance as a literary critic and her erudite, mature analysis."
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