Home › Books › Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
by
51/99
Critics' Rating Index
14/99
Readers' Rating Index
n/a
Scholars' Citation Index
84/99
Volume of Reviews
39/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"The essays in Unfinished Business are hybrid forms in which literary analysis, close reading, personal narrative, anecdotal aside, and sudden revelation alternate and combine."
"brief and characteristically pithy ..."
"But today, the rift in the self seems less consequential than the rift between rich and poor, and our economic, political, and ecological crises cannot be confronted in solitude."
"Gornick's ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection ..."
"Others may find that analysis challenging if not inaccessible, especially if they are not familiar with the writers about whom Gornick writes."
"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 ..."
"A delightful entry for lovers of literature and literary criticism."
"If I happen to feel that Gornick's response to Duras is a little tortured—that Duras does not yield easily to the sort of inquiry to which Gornick seeks to subject her—there lies the heart of Unfinished Business: Gornick and I both find so much of interest in The Lover, and yet her interests and my own seem scarcely to intersect ..."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!