Unfinished Business
Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
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ISBN10: 1250785723
ISBN13: 9781250785725
Trade Paperback
176 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
Longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
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.
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
Praise for Unfinished Business
“Gornick’s new book is part memoiristic collage, part literary criticism, yet it is also an urgent argument that re-reading 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 . . . Lively, personable . . . sneakily poignant . . . It is one of the great ironies of consuming literature that as much as we read to expand our minds, we often take in only whatever it is that we are primed to absorb at a particular moment. Do not, Gornick says in this brief, incisive book, let that be the end of it.”—Chloë Schama, The New York Times Book Review
"Vivacious and highly recommended."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Unfinished Business is all about different ways of looking, a chronicle of the protean perceptions and interpretations . . . Gornick certainly is convincing when she takes the perceived textual qualities of realness and life and brings them to bear on her own life . . . In each case, the new reading leads to a different destination; in each case, Gornick is guided by a yearning that has remained as constant through the years as a star."—Christopher Sorrentino, Bookforum
"Gornick’s ferocious but principled intelligence emanates from each of the essays in this distinctive collection . . . The author reads more deeply and keenly than most, with perceptions amplified by the perspective of her 84 years . . . Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A delightful entry for lovers of literature and literary criticism."—Library Journal (starred review)
"Through steady, sculpted prose and elegant readings, Gornick concludes the work of great literature is less about 'the transporting pleasure of the story itself' than revealing readers to themselves . . . The insights in this rich work will be appreciated by Gornick fans and bibliophiles alike."—Publishers Weekly
BOOK EXCERPTS
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I was twenty years old the day an English teacher put into my hands Sons and Lovers. Until then I’d never even heard the term “coming-of-age novel,” but I knew one when I saw one; and D. H. Lawrence put the matter...
About the author
Vivian Gornick
