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Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
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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."
Reviews
"brief and characteristically pithy ..."
"Unfinished Business takes us somewhere else with the same anecdote — further down the line of self-knowledge, through the aftermath of second-wave feminism, to the 'unfinished business' that fuels Gornick's present interest in rereading ..."
"The American romance with communism was a failure."
"A delightful entry for lovers of literature and literary criticism."
"Gornick's ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection ..."
"a chronicle of the protean perceptions and interpretations drawn from among the books that have, for one reason or another, stayed with Gornick through the passage of decades."
"Gornick's new book is part memoiristic collage, part literary criticism, yet it is also an urgent argument that rereading offers the opportunity not just to correct and adjust one's recollection of a book but to correct and adjust one's perception of oneself ..."
"literary cognoscente will appreciate Vivian Gornick's brilliance as a literary critic and her erudite, mature analysis."
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