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Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life
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.”
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.”
192 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published November 3, 2021
155 people are currently reading
4507 people want to read
About the author
Vivian Gornick
44 books1,144 followersVivian Gornick is the author of, among other books, the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments and three essay collections: The End of the Novel of Love, Approaching Eye Level, and, most recently, The Men in My Life. She lives in New York City.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 236 reviews
April 19, 2021
"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."
Yes, exactly. In this book of 10 chapters, Gornick revisits books that have meant something to her in some way, sometimes reading a book 3 or 4 times at different stages in her life, and finding different meanings each time. I have marveled at my own re-readings and how much life experiences and perceptions can color my opinion. For example, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it as a 12 year old and hung on every word, envying Francie's adoration of her fun loving, happy-go-lucky father , thinking her mother was too strict and hateful. Reading it again as a middle aged adult who had raised a daughter of my own, I saw the truth. Her father was a drunk, always spending what little money he had in bars, and her mother was overworked and overwhelmed by their poverty. Same words, different book, because I was a different reader.
I adored Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel in my idealistic 20's, but couldn't get through it just a few years ago. Life had turned me into a cynic. The examples could go on and on, but the fact is that as readers we either grow into or away from the content between the covers. A few books have remained as I first read them, most notably, To Kill A Mockingbird. These are books I can count on to be comforting whenever I read them again, never changing.
Vivian Gornick was a fine tour guide of the books she included here, some of which I had read before, others not at all. She writes with intelligence and insight, not always easy to find in an essayist. Recommended if you like books about books.
Yes, exactly. In this book of 10 chapters, Gornick revisits books that have meant something to her in some way, sometimes reading a book 3 or 4 times at different stages in her life, and finding different meanings each time. I have marveled at my own re-readings and how much life experiences and perceptions can color my opinion. For example, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it as a 12 year old and hung on every word, envying Francie's adoration of her fun loving, happy-go-lucky father , thinking her mother was too strict and hateful. Reading it again as a middle aged adult who had raised a daughter of my own, I saw the truth. Her father was a drunk, always spending what little money he had in bars, and her mother was overworked and overwhelmed by their poverty. Same words, different book, because I was a different reader.
I adored Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel in my idealistic 20's, but couldn't get through it just a few years ago. Life had turned me into a cynic. The examples could go on and on, but the fact is that as readers we either grow into or away from the content between the covers. A few books have remained as I first read them, most notably, To Kill A Mockingbird. These are books I can count on to be comforting whenever I read them again, never changing.
Vivian Gornick was a fine tour guide of the books she included here, some of which I had read before, others not at all. She writes with intelligence and insight, not always easy to find in an essayist. Recommended if you like books about books.
January 4, 2021
How to go about reviewing this book? Is there a point in trying to capture the essence of a book that, in turn, perfectly captures the essences of other books? Vivian Gornick is an enlightened writer who makes sure we won’t go away having the slightest doubt as to what were the intents and purposes of the authors she examines. I felt I gained a first-rate appreciation of a number of literary works simply by having participated in the author’s breadth and depth of critical thinking. This is a brilliant collection of essays on literature and the way we look to it in our effort to grasp our forever-eluding selves.
Same as in her other book of essays The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir, her capacity and readiness for unflinching self-examination deeply impressed and inspired me. No, this isn’t just a collection of literary essays; it is also a memoir and a vivid account of how differently she kept perceiving the same books each time she visited their pages throughout the years.
It made me wonder: Do we see in a novel (or in any piece of writing) what we want to see, ultimately? Are we forever ready to apply our own vision on the matters at hand at the slightest hint of compatibility or disagreement between the author’s and our own perceptions? Does the author’s insight serve as only a frame in which we put our own thoughts, happily pushing aside the work of art that is already there, often without even realizing we’re doing it? Do we really “listen”? Or do we unconsciously make the necessary adjustments so that the writer’s words fit into the molds we already carry in our heads? And lastly, do we pick our reading material expecting a confirmation of what we suspect or because we hope to find new paths for our thoughts?
I have an answer only to the last one: I think it depends on age. The younger we are the more we expect to be guided, the older we get the more we want affirmation, lest our carefully constructed mindset falls apart; more often than not we find that too exhausting.
I should present the books analyzed. But I won’t. Anyone interested can see them in the book description here on GR. I will only say that in each of the ten chapters, apart from a brief presentation of one or two books, an engrossing journey takes place. A journey both into the core of the book, as it was perceived by Gornick at the time(s) she read it, as well as into the core of her psyche at those phases of her life. I thought I had a revelation when it occurred to me that each chapter resembles a session between therapist and analysand (with Gornick playing both parts) but when I reached the end and turned to the gorgeous introduction for a re-read, there it was in the very first sentence: “It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch.” That’s how fast we forget, how little attention we sometimes pay to what we’ve just read!
I think that the common theme among the books discussed, the idea that haunts and inspires all the authors mentioned is the solitude of self, the existential loneliness, the self-alienation. Call it what you like, we have all known, more or less, at one time or another, what we’re talking about here. That, and the (often distorted) ways people find to assuage the angst that comes with it.
Here in Christminster, stripped of the dream of life that kept him company for so many years, he suddenly sees himself as a creature alone in a hostile universe….how limited is the power of shared sensibility to save us from the primeval ooze within ourselves, ever waiting to flood the pain of insufficient self-knowledge. On Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure”.
The irony – disconnect drives one to pleasure; pleasure acts on one like a drug; to be drugged is to feel the disconnect even more acutely – struck her as existentially profound. On Duras’ “ The Lover”.
Set in London in the fall of 1942, it is preoccupied with the unknown within ourselves breaking through during a time of devastation, revealing the fatal lack of fellow feeling beneath the civilized surface we assume as a second skin. On Bowen’s “The Heat of the Day”.
Extraordinary, when one comes to think about it, the compelling need to bend ourselves out of shape, rationalize trade-offs of an incredible variety, endure a lifetime of intermingled pleasure and pain – all in order to not be alone. On Ginzburg’s essay “He and I”.
And this remarkable sentence from the chapter devoted to D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”: Not only does sexual ecstasy not deliver us to ourselves, one must have a self already in place to know what to do with it, should it come.
But solitude is not always bad, of course; not when it’s put to good use. Here’s Gornick’s take on it: “All that I needed was there in the room with me. I was there in the room with me. Nothing else in my life – neither love nor the promise of wealth or fame or even good health – would ever match the feeling of being alone to myself- real to myself – that writing gave me.”
I want to close this on a hopeful note because this book is not bleak. It is delightful in its condensed wisdom and sharp insight that can only make us richer by urging us to read or re-read the works mentioned, if only to compare notes with a very perceptive chronic re-reader and thinker. Here she is, in her own words:
Once again, I found myself reading differently. I took out the books – novels in particular- I had read and reread, and read them again. This time around I saw that whatever the story, whatever the style, whatever the period, the central drama in literary work was nearly always dependent on the perniciousness of the human self-divide: the fear and ignorance it generates, the shame it gives rise to, the debilitating mystery in which it enshrouds us. I also saw that invariably what made the work of a good book affecting – and this was something implicit in the writing, trapped somewhere in the nerves of the prose – was some haunted imagining of human existence with the rift healed, the parts brought together, the hunger for connection put in brilliant working order. Great literature, I thought then and think now, is a record not of achievement of wholeness of being but of the ingrained effort made on its behalf.
Same as in her other book of essays The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir, her capacity and readiness for unflinching self-examination deeply impressed and inspired me. No, this isn’t just a collection of literary essays; it is also a memoir and a vivid account of how differently she kept perceiving the same books each time she visited their pages throughout the years.
It made me wonder: Do we see in a novel (or in any piece of writing) what we want to see, ultimately? Are we forever ready to apply our own vision on the matters at hand at the slightest hint of compatibility or disagreement between the author’s and our own perceptions? Does the author’s insight serve as only a frame in which we put our own thoughts, happily pushing aside the work of art that is already there, often without even realizing we’re doing it? Do we really “listen”? Or do we unconsciously make the necessary adjustments so that the writer’s words fit into the molds we already carry in our heads? And lastly, do we pick our reading material expecting a confirmation of what we suspect or because we hope to find new paths for our thoughts?
I have an answer only to the last one: I think it depends on age. The younger we are the more we expect to be guided, the older we get the more we want affirmation, lest our carefully constructed mindset falls apart; more often than not we find that too exhausting.
I should present the books analyzed. But I won’t. Anyone interested can see them in the book description here on GR. I will only say that in each of the ten chapters, apart from a brief presentation of one or two books, an engrossing journey takes place. A journey both into the core of the book, as it was perceived by Gornick at the time(s) she read it, as well as into the core of her psyche at those phases of her life. I thought I had a revelation when it occurred to me that each chapter resembles a session between therapist and analysand (with Gornick playing both parts) but when I reached the end and turned to the gorgeous introduction for a re-read, there it was in the very first sentence: “It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch.” That’s how fast we forget, how little attention we sometimes pay to what we’ve just read!
I think that the common theme among the books discussed, the idea that haunts and inspires all the authors mentioned is the solitude of self, the existential loneliness, the self-alienation. Call it what you like, we have all known, more or less, at one time or another, what we’re talking about here. That, and the (often distorted) ways people find to assuage the angst that comes with it.
Here in Christminster, stripped of the dream of life that kept him company for so many years, he suddenly sees himself as a creature alone in a hostile universe….how limited is the power of shared sensibility to save us from the primeval ooze within ourselves, ever waiting to flood the pain of insufficient self-knowledge. On Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure”.
The irony – disconnect drives one to pleasure; pleasure acts on one like a drug; to be drugged is to feel the disconnect even more acutely – struck her as existentially profound. On Duras’ “ The Lover”.
Set in London in the fall of 1942, it is preoccupied with the unknown within ourselves breaking through during a time of devastation, revealing the fatal lack of fellow feeling beneath the civilized surface we assume as a second skin. On Bowen’s “The Heat of the Day”.
Extraordinary, when one comes to think about it, the compelling need to bend ourselves out of shape, rationalize trade-offs of an incredible variety, endure a lifetime of intermingled pleasure and pain – all in order to not be alone. On Ginzburg’s essay “He and I”.
And this remarkable sentence from the chapter devoted to D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”: Not only does sexual ecstasy not deliver us to ourselves, one must have a self already in place to know what to do with it, should it come.
But solitude is not always bad, of course; not when it’s put to good use. Here’s Gornick’s take on it: “All that I needed was there in the room with me. I was there in the room with me. Nothing else in my life – neither love nor the promise of wealth or fame or even good health – would ever match the feeling of being alone to myself- real to myself – that writing gave me.”
I want to close this on a hopeful note because this book is not bleak. It is delightful in its condensed wisdom and sharp insight that can only make us richer by urging us to read or re-read the works mentioned, if only to compare notes with a very perceptive chronic re-reader and thinker. Here she is, in her own words:
Once again, I found myself reading differently. I took out the books – novels in particular- I had read and reread, and read them again. This time around I saw that whatever the story, whatever the style, whatever the period, the central drama in literary work was nearly always dependent on the perniciousness of the human self-divide: the fear and ignorance it generates, the shame it gives rise to, the debilitating mystery in which it enshrouds us. I also saw that invariably what made the work of a good book affecting – and this was something implicit in the writing, trapped somewhere in the nerves of the prose – was some haunted imagining of human existence with the rift healed, the parts brought together, the hunger for connection put in brilliant working order. Great literature, I thought then and think now, is a record not of achievement of wholeness of being but of the ingrained effort made on its behalf.
December 17, 2020
4.5 stars rounded up.
I’ve often had the experience of reading a book and deeply identifying with a character through their struggles, fears and triumphs. In Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, Vivian Gornick takes this experience a few steps further. She thinks about and inhabits the lives of characters as if they are living and breathing beings about whom she has strong feelings and opinons and from whom she can learn, all of which changes over time in pursuit of “the unfinished business” which is Gornick’s life-long efforts towards personal growth.
In this book Gornick shares her experiences of decades of reading and how her changing understanding of characters in books reflects and coincides with her own personal growth and maturity. She vividly describes plots, characters, and authors, and examines all three through the lens of her personal history and her current understanding of herself, reflecting on how aging, maturation, and changes in self-awareness and circumstances caused characters to resonate with her in a new way on each reread. She uses personal anecdotes about her life to elucidate her latest insights about a book or a character and their impact on her. Gornick is such good company throughout these musings which are as emotionally open as they are intellectually stimulating.
In this small book of 10 chapters, one chapter per author or subject, Gornick shares her reflections on some of her favorite authors, including D.H. Lawrence, Colette, A.B. Yehoshua, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Doris Lessing, Natalia Ginzburg, Pat Barker and J.L. Carr.
Gornick doesn’t grapple for self-understanding in every chapter of this reading memoir but she always delights in finding just the right book or passage that speaks to her about her experience or provides her with a different spin on a character or author whom she thinks she fully understands.. One chapter, for instance, is devoted to her adoption of 2 kittens. Gornick had never lived with cats and knew nothing about them; how to care for them, how to understand their play or how to get them to cuddle with her. She struggles to understand these cats and their aloofness well into their adulthood. When Gornick eventually picks up a book by Doris Lessing which was presented to her by a friend when she initially adopted the kittens and was quickly forgotten (“how could Doris Lessing help me with understanding cats?) she finds exactly the information and experiences which speak to her predicament and finds herself not only more educated about her felines but also more comfortable around them.
In one other chapter which doesn't fit the mold of rereading and self-reflection Gornick meets A.B. Yehoshua on her first visit to Israel. Without spoiling this wonderful anecdote I'll just say that Yehoshua found the wrong audience in Gornick for his forceful lecture on the importance of Zionism and his declaration that all Jews, including Gornick, should be living in Israel,. She was so appalled by him that it took years for her to read anything written by him. She delighted in meeting a very different man in his short stories once she was able to open one of his books.
But one of the best examples of how Gornick’s rereading over times changes her perception of a character and herself is in her discussion of Sue Bridehead from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. She begins this discussion with an anecdote from one of her own therapy sessions. In the middle of this session Gornick says to her analyst, “Now for the first time I see how devious I’ve been with men in relationships.” Her analyst “allows herself a look of weariness” and asks, “when are you going to act on what you now for the first time see?” Gornick thinks to herself, “what a fate… that of the New York analyst, condemned to listening to analysands, like me, insight manufacturers one and all, forever seeing something for the first time, never being able to act on what they see.” Then she says, “fuck it, let me out of here…. I can’t do it….let me out of this life.”
This memory is followed up with the history of Gornick’s lifelong relationship with the character Sue Bridehead. Searching for an explanation for ”Sue’s godawful behavior" during a reread of Jude, "I recalled this scene in my analyst’s office and thought, “she can’t do it either. She too just wants out.” “She,” being of course, Sue Bridehead.
In her late teens and ‘20s Gornick “ached" for the characters in Thomas Hardy novels and read them over and over again because they reflected her own feelings at that time. “They were doomed to years of suffering… only because they were born in the wrong place and wrong time.” But no character pleased her more than Sue Bridehead with whom she so identified and for whom she felt so much sympathy.
Years later after a reread of Jude she sees for the first time in Sue’s character “how a Victorian novelist tracked the resistance to consciousness which afflicts us all through the movements of a character with so much flesh and blood reality she seems nearly a case study.” The case study is the relationship between Jude and Sue, seeing for the first time Sue’s sexual abstinence and the “double bind of sexual attraction and revulsion.” At that point in her life Gornick sympathizes with Sue’s plight and self-imposed loneliness and sees it as a courageous means to achieve a sense of self through being alone.
“Ten years later Sue’s courageous abstinence lost it’s glamour and Sue was getting on my nerves,” Gornick writes. Now Gornick refers to Sue’s abstinence and relationship with Jude as “lunatic behavior.” And 10 years later, after having an illegal abortion, Gornick felt a sense of foreboding and fear of retribution which she didn’t understand in the least since she was “secular to the bone.” With trepidation and “superstitious dread” she takes Jude off the bookshelf and reads. “For the first time I understood the darkness at the bottom of Sue’s personality and the “willful blindness” which I knew so well.
Most recently she wondered if the novel “had finished saying all it had to say to me.” This is the question she has for many of the novels she returns to again and again.
I listened to the audio version which was narrated by the author.
I’ve often had the experience of reading a book and deeply identifying with a character through their struggles, fears and triumphs. In Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, Vivian Gornick takes this experience a few steps further. She thinks about and inhabits the lives of characters as if they are living and breathing beings about whom she has strong feelings and opinons and from whom she can learn, all of which changes over time in pursuit of “the unfinished business” which is Gornick’s life-long efforts towards personal growth.
In this book Gornick shares her experiences of decades of reading and how her changing understanding of characters in books reflects and coincides with her own personal growth and maturity. She vividly describes plots, characters, and authors, and examines all three through the lens of her personal history and her current understanding of herself, reflecting on how aging, maturation, and changes in self-awareness and circumstances caused characters to resonate with her in a new way on each reread. She uses personal anecdotes about her life to elucidate her latest insights about a book or a character and their impact on her. Gornick is such good company throughout these musings which are as emotionally open as they are intellectually stimulating.
In this small book of 10 chapters, one chapter per author or subject, Gornick shares her reflections on some of her favorite authors, including D.H. Lawrence, Colette, A.B. Yehoshua, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Doris Lessing, Natalia Ginzburg, Pat Barker and J.L. Carr.
Gornick doesn’t grapple for self-understanding in every chapter of this reading memoir but she always delights in finding just the right book or passage that speaks to her about her experience or provides her with a different spin on a character or author whom she thinks she fully understands.. One chapter, for instance, is devoted to her adoption of 2 kittens. Gornick had never lived with cats and knew nothing about them; how to care for them, how to understand their play or how to get them to cuddle with her. She struggles to understand these cats and their aloofness well into their adulthood. When Gornick eventually picks up a book by Doris Lessing which was presented to her by a friend when she initially adopted the kittens and was quickly forgotten (“how could Doris Lessing help me with understanding cats?) she finds exactly the information and experiences which speak to her predicament and finds herself not only more educated about her felines but also more comfortable around them.
In one other chapter which doesn't fit the mold of rereading and self-reflection Gornick meets A.B. Yehoshua on her first visit to Israel. Without spoiling this wonderful anecdote I'll just say that Yehoshua found the wrong audience in Gornick for his forceful lecture on the importance of Zionism and his declaration that all Jews, including Gornick, should be living in Israel,. She was so appalled by him that it took years for her to read anything written by him. She delighted in meeting a very different man in his short stories once she was able to open one of his books.
But one of the best examples of how Gornick’s rereading over times changes her perception of a character and herself is in her discussion of Sue Bridehead from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. She begins this discussion with an anecdote from one of her own therapy sessions. In the middle of this session Gornick says to her analyst, “Now for the first time I see how devious I’ve been with men in relationships.” Her analyst “allows herself a look of weariness” and asks, “when are you going to act on what you now for the first time see?” Gornick thinks to herself, “what a fate… that of the New York analyst, condemned to listening to analysands, like me, insight manufacturers one and all, forever seeing something for the first time, never being able to act on what they see.” Then she says, “fuck it, let me out of here…. I can’t do it….let me out of this life.”
This memory is followed up with the history of Gornick’s lifelong relationship with the character Sue Bridehead. Searching for an explanation for ”Sue’s godawful behavior" during a reread of Jude, "I recalled this scene in my analyst’s office and thought, “she can’t do it either. She too just wants out.” “She,” being of course, Sue Bridehead.
In her late teens and ‘20s Gornick “ached" for the characters in Thomas Hardy novels and read them over and over again because they reflected her own feelings at that time. “They were doomed to years of suffering… only because they were born in the wrong place and wrong time.” But no character pleased her more than Sue Bridehead with whom she so identified and for whom she felt so much sympathy.
Years later after a reread of Jude she sees for the first time in Sue’s character “how a Victorian novelist tracked the resistance to consciousness which afflicts us all through the movements of a character with so much flesh and blood reality she seems nearly a case study.” The case study is the relationship between Jude and Sue, seeing for the first time Sue’s sexual abstinence and the “double bind of sexual attraction and revulsion.” At that point in her life Gornick sympathizes with Sue’s plight and self-imposed loneliness and sees it as a courageous means to achieve a sense of self through being alone.
“Ten years later Sue’s courageous abstinence lost it’s glamour and Sue was getting on my nerves,” Gornick writes. Now Gornick refers to Sue’s abstinence and relationship with Jude as “lunatic behavior.” And 10 years later, after having an illegal abortion, Gornick felt a sense of foreboding and fear of retribution which she didn’t understand in the least since she was “secular to the bone.” With trepidation and “superstitious dread” she takes Jude off the bookshelf and reads. “For the first time I understood the darkness at the bottom of Sue’s personality and the “willful blindness” which I knew so well.
Most recently she wondered if the novel “had finished saying all it had to say to me.” This is the question she has for many of the novels she returns to again and again.
I listened to the audio version which was narrated by the author.
Read
March 13, 2020I got to the end of this brief collection of literary essays thinking that I'd very much like to have Vivien Gornick over for dinner. She is an interesting person. She and I have almost nothing in common when it comes to reading, or re-reading, and that was a bit of a barrier when it came to enjoying her literary criticism. These brief essays make assumptions about how people read and I just am so not like her this way. Hmm, to give an example...well she is just very, very character-focused, identifying with fictional characters and deriving meanings from their actions as if they were real people making choices. I honestly never read this way. I read for theme and movement and language and I'm constantly aware of characters as vessels for a certain philosophy or point of view that was important to the author...if I identify with anyone, it's the author. Recognizing this difference in how I approach my reading was interesting, too, somehow--that we might be reading the same book or looking at the same page and getting something completely different from it--but it was distancing to me that Gornick didn't seem to be aware that there are many ways to read, and re-read. I think if she came over for dinner I'd be doing a lot of listening.
July 24, 2021
Most of the authors' names and book titles mentioned in this essay are familiar to me, but I don't believe I've read a single one. Hi, my name is Charles and I'm a recovering Philistine.
I'm walking away from this book with the firm intention of reading A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, one day, but also Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, when Victorian novels tempt me anew.
Conversely, it has become clear that I'm not terribly likely to ever go for Natalia Ginzburg, which is not to say Vivian Gornick didn't read and reread her, herself.
Interesting perspectives, from one chapter to the next, a lot of them having to do with couple dynamics and Gornick's personal growth.
I'm walking away from this book with the firm intention of reading A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, one day, but also Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, when Victorian novels tempt me anew.
Conversely, it has become clear that I'm not terribly likely to ever go for Natalia Ginzburg, which is not to say Vivian Gornick didn't read and reread her, herself.
Interesting perspectives, from one chapter to the next, a lot of them having to do with couple dynamics and Gornick's personal growth.
July 9, 2023
This being advertised as a collection of essays that discuss rereading, you can forgive me for assuming that there would be substantial conversations about the practice, not just long, drawn-out recaps of entire books' plots with the occasional relatable remark about rereading thrown in. I really thought I would enjoy this one more.
Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.
Click here to hear more of my thoughts on this book over on my Booktube channel, abookolive.
Read
December 14, 2021This year, I haven't read as much as I'd have liked. But what I have done is re-read. I've perused my bookshelves, picked books according to the mood of the week, and glanced through margin notes. Re-reading a book and revisiting your notes, your penmanship, in the margins from years prior, is a personal, indescribable feeling. Gornick highlights that feeling here. This book is both literary analysis and personal narrative. Vivian Gornick has taken me through some literary classes before. Her book The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative is one I hold dear. This book is not only a literary conversation, but also a manifestation of close-reading. I'm glad it offered me an opportunity to revisit Ginzburg, Camus, Bowen, Duras, Collette, Lawrence, and others.
February 4, 2022
(4.5) Every essay excellent, and the one regarding Natalia Ginzburg, as well as being possibly my favourite, had me immediately ordering two Ginzburg books.
July 6, 2021
'Between what we know and what we cannot hope to know about how we come to be as we are lies an emotional dumping ground into which exceptional writers pour all the art they are capable of making.'
An absolute pleasure to read. A stunning 4.5 that I might change to a full 5 star later. RTC.
May 18, 2021
This review disappeared from this spot but I found it just below the list of my friends in the reviews by others on GR. Diane's review is first and mine is right after with all the comments.
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4.5 stars rounded up.
I’ve often had the experience of reading a book and deeply identifying with a character through their struggles, fears and triumphs. In Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, Vivian Gornick takes this experience a few steps further. She thinks about and inhabits the lives of characters as if they are living and breathing beings about whom she has strong feelings and opinons and from whom she can learn, all of which changes over time in pursuit of “the unfinished business” which is Gornick’s life-long efforts towards personal growth.
In this book Gornick shares her experiences of decades of reading and how her changing understanding of characters in books reflects and coincides with her own personal growth and maturity. She vividly describes plots, characters, and authors, and examines all three through the lens of her personal history and her current understanding of herself, reflecting on how aging, maturation, and changes in self-awareness and circumstances caused characters to resonate with her in a new way on each reread. She uses personal anecdotes about her life to elucidate her latest insights about a book or a character and their impact on her. Gornick is such good company throughout these musings which are as emotionally open as they are intellectually stimulating.
In this small book of 10 chapters, one chapter per author or subject, Gornick shares her reflections on some of her favorite authors, including D.H. Lawrence, Colette, A.B. Yehoshua, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Doris Lessing, Natalia Ginzburg, Pat Barker and J.L. Carr.
Gornick doesn’t grapple for self-understanding in every chapter of this reading memoir but she always delights in finding just the right book or passage that speaks to her about her experience or provides her with a different spin on a character or author whom she thinks she fully understands.. One chapter, for instance, is devoted to her adoption of 2 kittens. Gornick had never lived with cats and knew nothing about them; how to care for them, how to understand their play or how to get them to cuddle with her. She struggles to understand these cats and their aloofness well into their adulthood. When Gornick eventually picks up a book by Doris Lessing which was presented to her by a friend when she initially adopted the kittens and was quickly forgotten (“how could Doris Lessing help me with understanding cats?) she finds exactly the information and experiences which speak to her predicament and finds herself not only more educated about her felines but also more comfortable around them.
In one other chapter which doesn't fit the mold of rereading and self-reflection Gornick meets A.B. Yehoshua on her first visit to Israel. Without spoiling this wonderful anecdote I'll just say that Yehoshua found the wrong audience in Gornick for his forceful lecture on the importance of Zionism and his declaration that all Jews, including Gornick, should be living in Israel,. She was so appalled by him that it took years for her to read anything written by him. She delighted in meeting a very different man in his short stories once she was able to open one of his books.
But one of the best examples of how Gornick’s rereading over times changes her perception of a character and herself is in her discussion of Sue Bridehead from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. She begins this discussion with an anecdote from one of her own therapy sessions. In the middle of this session Gornick says to her analyst, “Now for the first time I see how devious I’ve been with men in relationships.” Her analyst “allows herself a look of weariness” and asks, “when are you going to act on what you now for the first time see?” Gornick thinks to herself, “what a fate… that of the New York analyst, condemned to listening to analysands, like me, insight manufacturers one and all, forever seeing something for the first time, never being able to act on what they see.” Then she says, “fuck it, let me out of here…. I can’t do it….let me out of this life.”
This memory is followed up with the history of Gornick’s lifelong relationship with the character Sue Bridehead. Searching for an explanation for ”Sue’s godawful behavior" during a reread of Jude, "I recalled this scene in my analyst’s office and thought, “she can’t do it either. She too just wants out.” “She,” being of course, Sue Bridehead.
In her late teens and ‘20s Gornick “ached" for the characters in Thomas Hardy novels and read them over and over again because they reflected her own feelings at that time. “They were doomed to years of suffering… only because they were born in the wrong place and wrong time.” But no character pleased her more than Sue Bridehead with whom she so identified and for whom she felt so much sympathy.
Years later after a reread of Jude she sees for the first time in Sue’s character “how a Victorian novelist tracked the resistance to consciousness which afflicts us all through the movements of a character with so much flesh and blood reality she seems nearly a case study.” The case study is the relationship between Jude and Sue, seeing for the first time Sue’s sexual abstinence and the “double bind of sexual attraction and revulsion.” At that point in her life Gornick sympathizes with Sue’s plight and self-imposed loneliness and sees it as a courageous means to achieve a sense of self through being alone.
“Ten years later Sue’s courageous abstinence lost it’s glamour and Sue was getting on my nerves,” Gornick writes. Now Gornick refers to Sue’s abstinence and relationship with Jude as “lunatic behavior.” And 10 years later, after having an illegal abortion, Gornick felt a sense of foreboding and fear of retribution which she didn’t understand in the least since she was “secular to the bone.” With trepidation and “superstitious dread” she takes Jude off the bookshelf and reads. “For the first time I understood the darkness at the bottom of Sue’s personality and the “willful blindness” which I knew so well.
Most recently she wondered if the novel “had finished saying all it had to say to me.” This is the question she has for many of the novels she returns to again and again.
I listened to the audio version which was narrated by the author.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.5 stars rounded up.
I’ve often had the experience of reading a book and deeply identifying with a character through their struggles, fears and triumphs. In Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, Vivian Gornick takes this experience a few steps further. She thinks about and inhabits the lives of characters as if they are living and breathing beings about whom she has strong feelings and opinons and from whom she can learn, all of which changes over time in pursuit of “the unfinished business” which is Gornick’s life-long efforts towards personal growth.
In this book Gornick shares her experiences of decades of reading and how her changing understanding of characters in books reflects and coincides with her own personal growth and maturity. She vividly describes plots, characters, and authors, and examines all three through the lens of her personal history and her current understanding of herself, reflecting on how aging, maturation, and changes in self-awareness and circumstances caused characters to resonate with her in a new way on each reread. She uses personal anecdotes about her life to elucidate her latest insights about a book or a character and their impact on her. Gornick is such good company throughout these musings which are as emotionally open as they are intellectually stimulating.
In this small book of 10 chapters, one chapter per author or subject, Gornick shares her reflections on some of her favorite authors, including D.H. Lawrence, Colette, A.B. Yehoshua, Elizabeth Bowen, Marguerite Duras, Doris Lessing, Natalia Ginzburg, Pat Barker and J.L. Carr.
Gornick doesn’t grapple for self-understanding in every chapter of this reading memoir but she always delights in finding just the right book or passage that speaks to her about her experience or provides her with a different spin on a character or author whom she thinks she fully understands.. One chapter, for instance, is devoted to her adoption of 2 kittens. Gornick had never lived with cats and knew nothing about them; how to care for them, how to understand their play or how to get them to cuddle with her. She struggles to understand these cats and their aloofness well into their adulthood. When Gornick eventually picks up a book by Doris Lessing which was presented to her by a friend when she initially adopted the kittens and was quickly forgotten (“how could Doris Lessing help me with understanding cats?) she finds exactly the information and experiences which speak to her predicament and finds herself not only more educated about her felines but also more comfortable around them.
In one other chapter which doesn't fit the mold of rereading and self-reflection Gornick meets A.B. Yehoshua on her first visit to Israel. Without spoiling this wonderful anecdote I'll just say that Yehoshua found the wrong audience in Gornick for his forceful lecture on the importance of Zionism and his declaration that all Jews, including Gornick, should be living in Israel,. She was so appalled by him that it took years for her to read anything written by him. She delighted in meeting a very different man in his short stories once she was able to open one of his books.
But one of the best examples of how Gornick’s rereading over times changes her perception of a character and herself is in her discussion of Sue Bridehead from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. She begins this discussion with an anecdote from one of her own therapy sessions. In the middle of this session Gornick says to her analyst, “Now for the first time I see how devious I’ve been with men in relationships.” Her analyst “allows herself a look of weariness” and asks, “when are you going to act on what you now for the first time see?” Gornick thinks to herself, “what a fate… that of the New York analyst, condemned to listening to analysands, like me, insight manufacturers one and all, forever seeing something for the first time, never being able to act on what they see.” Then she says, “fuck it, let me out of here…. I can’t do it….let me out of this life.”
This memory is followed up with the history of Gornick’s lifelong relationship with the character Sue Bridehead. Searching for an explanation for ”Sue’s godawful behavior" during a reread of Jude, "I recalled this scene in my analyst’s office and thought, “she can’t do it either. She too just wants out.” “She,” being of course, Sue Bridehead.
In her late teens and ‘20s Gornick “ached" for the characters in Thomas Hardy novels and read them over and over again because they reflected her own feelings at that time. “They were doomed to years of suffering… only because they were born in the wrong place and wrong time.” But no character pleased her more than Sue Bridehead with whom she so identified and for whom she felt so much sympathy.
Years later after a reread of Jude she sees for the first time in Sue’s character “how a Victorian novelist tracked the resistance to consciousness which afflicts us all through the movements of a character with so much flesh and blood reality she seems nearly a case study.” The case study is the relationship between Jude and Sue, seeing for the first time Sue’s sexual abstinence and the “double bind of sexual attraction and revulsion.” At that point in her life Gornick sympathizes with Sue’s plight and self-imposed loneliness and sees it as a courageous means to achieve a sense of self through being alone.
“Ten years later Sue’s courageous abstinence lost it’s glamour and Sue was getting on my nerves,” Gornick writes. Now Gornick refers to Sue’s abstinence and relationship with Jude as “lunatic behavior.” And 10 years later, after having an illegal abortion, Gornick felt a sense of foreboding and fear of retribution which she didn’t understand in the least since she was “secular to the bone.” With trepidation and “superstitious dread” she takes Jude off the bookshelf and reads. “For the first time I understood the darkness at the bottom of Sue’s personality and the “willful blindness” which I knew so well.
Most recently she wondered if the novel “had finished saying all it had to say to me.” This is the question she has for many of the novels she returns to again and again.
I listened to the audio version which was narrated by the author.
December 5, 2021
Cómo he gozado esto nuevo de la Gornik, el repaso por sus años lectores que no es otra cosa que ir recordándose y descubriéndose.
Sin duda es el capítulo diez, el último y el más corto, el que más me representa. Yo soy ella cuando cae en sus manos un antiguo libro subrayado y lleno de notas. ¿Por qué carajo subrayaste esto y no lo otro que, hoy, sin duda alguna, parece más interesante? ¿Cómo es posible que no le prestase atención en aquella lectura, hace tantos años?
Con su habitual inteligencia mordaz Vivian Gornik homenajea a los escritores y escritoras de su vida, las obras que consiguieron marcarla, aquellas que le ayudaron a conocerse mejor y, de paso, las que nos acercan a ella. Leerla como lectora es conocerla un poquito mejor y descubrir que es a través de nuestra lecturas la mejor manera de descubrir quiénes somos, nuestras miserias, nuestros miedos y anhelos. Nuestra nada.
#lectura #books #libro #libros #librosrecomendados #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #librosdeinstagram #leeressexy #readingissexy
Sin duda es el capítulo diez, el último y el más corto, el que más me representa. Yo soy ella cuando cae en sus manos un antiguo libro subrayado y lleno de notas. ¿Por qué carajo subrayaste esto y no lo otro que, hoy, sin duda alguna, parece más interesante? ¿Cómo es posible que no le prestase atención en aquella lectura, hace tantos años?
Con su habitual inteligencia mordaz Vivian Gornik homenajea a los escritores y escritoras de su vida, las obras que consiguieron marcarla, aquellas que le ayudaron a conocerse mejor y, de paso, las que nos acercan a ella. Leerla como lectora es conocerla un poquito mejor y descubrir que es a través de nuestra lecturas la mejor manera de descubrir quiénes somos, nuestras miserias, nuestros miedos y anhelos. Nuestra nada.
#lectura #books #libro #libros #librosrecomendados #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #librosdeinstagram #leeressexy #readingissexy
December 13, 2020
This book is a good example of what happens when a book doesn't meet my expectations and doesn't interest me on its own terms, either: it gets an enthusiastic 2 out of 5 stars.
I'd never heard of Vivian Gornick. I heard her discuss this book on the New York Times Book Review Podcast with Pamela Paul, which I listen to like religion. Nothing caps off my work week like jumping in my truck at 5:00 on Friday and turning on this podcast as I commute from work. Since rereading is a new habit I'm developing, a book on the topic seemed like the right book at the right time. If only.
I wanted to hear about the why, what, how, when, and wherefores of re-reading. But no. This book focused on specific authors and books that I either hadn't read or didn't care about. If there was any generalizing about rereading, I missed it. The Introduction pulled me in, of course, because otherwise why bother with the book at all. Sadly, that's where the party ended.
First of all, Gornick is 20+ years older than me, quite a difference in generations. Books that were scandalous in her generation (Sons and Lovers and various books by Colette) were required high school reading for my generation, simply because they were racy. Actually the book's first chapter discusses what she thought she read in Sons and Lovers and what she actually read when she went back to it decades later, with a lot of living and experience under her belt. Chapter 1 was actually not half bad and made me think perhaps I'll re-read Sons and Lovers myself. On further reflection, it sounds pretty depressing so I'll pass.
In later chapters Gornick talks about Elizabeth Bowen, AB Yehoshua, and several feminist writers that were foundational to the women's movement of the 1960s. Snoozefest!
Of course I'm familiar with rereading a book and discovering that it's not what I've remembered for decades. For that reason, some books I refuse to re-read. I like the memory I have about those books and I don't want that ruined. When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in my 20s, I thought it was hysterically funny. When I reread it in my 50s, it broke my heart. Here was a kid in a mental hospital, not even 20 years old. I still hold Catcher up as a favorite, and I will read it again. I even look forward to what I will discover on reading #3. But Flowers for Algernon? That one made me cry the first time around, and I still think of it as a terrifically sad book, and I want to keep it that way. Those are only 2 examples. Perhaps if Gornick had discussed books more familiar to me, I would've gotten more out of her book.
If you're looking for books about rereading, skip this one unless you share something with Gornick or you like her other work. The book wasn't what I hoped it was, and I wasn't interested in what it actually was.
I'm still looking for books that address rereading. Got any ideas?
P.S. The first paragraph of Chapter 3 was probably my favorite in the entire book, a short segment from Duras's novel The Lover.
I'd never heard of Vivian Gornick. I heard her discuss this book on the New York Times Book Review Podcast with Pamela Paul, which I listen to like religion. Nothing caps off my work week like jumping in my truck at 5:00 on Friday and turning on this podcast as I commute from work. Since rereading is a new habit I'm developing, a book on the topic seemed like the right book at the right time. If only.
I wanted to hear about the why, what, how, when, and wherefores of re-reading. But no. This book focused on specific authors and books that I either hadn't read or didn't care about. If there was any generalizing about rereading, I missed it. The Introduction pulled me in, of course, because otherwise why bother with the book at all. Sadly, that's where the party ended.
First of all, Gornick is 20+ years older than me, quite a difference in generations. Books that were scandalous in her generation (Sons and Lovers and various books by Colette) were required high school reading for my generation, simply because they were racy. Actually the book's first chapter discusses what she thought she read in Sons and Lovers and what she actually read when she went back to it decades later, with a lot of living and experience under her belt. Chapter 1 was actually not half bad and made me think perhaps I'll re-read Sons and Lovers myself. On further reflection, it sounds pretty depressing so I'll pass.
In later chapters Gornick talks about Elizabeth Bowen, AB Yehoshua, and several feminist writers that were foundational to the women's movement of the 1960s. Snoozefest!
Of course I'm familiar with rereading a book and discovering that it's not what I've remembered for decades. For that reason, some books I refuse to re-read. I like the memory I have about those books and I don't want that ruined. When I read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time in my 20s, I thought it was hysterically funny. When I reread it in my 50s, it broke my heart. Here was a kid in a mental hospital, not even 20 years old. I still hold Catcher up as a favorite, and I will read it again. I even look forward to what I will discover on reading #3. But Flowers for Algernon? That one made me cry the first time around, and I still think of it as a terrifically sad book, and I want to keep it that way. Those are only 2 examples. Perhaps if Gornick had discussed books more familiar to me, I would've gotten more out of her book.
If you're looking for books about rereading, skip this one unless you share something with Gornick or you like her other work. The book wasn't what I hoped it was, and I wasn't interested in what it actually was.
I'm still looking for books that address rereading. Got any ideas?
P.S. The first paragraph of Chapter 3 was probably my favorite in the entire book, a short segment from Duras's novel The Lover.
Read
August 3, 2020A beautiful book on the process of forgetting and remembering the books that we’ve read as we visit them again later in life. This book can help mend the anxieties that readers have about forgetting most of what they read with Gornick’s experience of giving new meaning to books that she has already read. I loved that she described the feeling of thinking of a book as mediocre on the first read vs. a change in opinion later on in life: “It’s the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.” I found her experiences to be engrossing and never boring or repetitive. It’s a book that I’ll be thinking about as I continue to read and revisit my favorites.
March 22, 2022
Vivian Gornick (Nueva York, 1935). Periodista, escritora y activista feminista. Nació en el Bronx en el seno de una familia judía, socialista y obrera.
📖 «Cuentas pendientes» (2020)
Traduce: Julia Osuna Aguilar
Edita: @sextopiso_es
🍂
«Como la mayoría de lectores, a veces creo que nací leyendo», afirma Gornick en la introducción del libro. Con esta frase me siento identificada. «No leo novela contemporánea», afirmó Gornick en una entrevista reciente. Con esta frase no, de lo contrario no estaría leyéndola a ella. Pero sí hay un aprendizaje que extraigo de estas «Cuentas pendientes»: el misterio insondable para nosotras, lectoras, de la relectura.
🍂
Yo releo poco, Gornick relee mucho, y de ahí sale este ensayo-memoria en el que compara a la Gornick pasada, temblando con un libro por primera vez, con la Gornick presente buscando ese mismo temblor en la relectura.
🍂
Hay autoras que aguantan, incluso crecen, con el repaso (Colette, Duras, Bowen). Otros autores, sin embargo, no atraviesan ya la piel cicatrizada por la vida y la experiencia lectora crítica (D.H. Lawrence, Schwartz).
🍂
Lo más maravilloso no es solo ver cómo esa Gornick (mujer-lectora) ha ido evolucionando con el tiempo, sino sumergirnos, como si retirásemos una cortinilla para cotillear, en la vida íntima de la autora. Gornick trenza su vida con los libros, comparte con nosotras reflexiones, secretos, como una amiga que nos susurra con una copa de vino en la mano. Ese intimismo, esa sabiduría compartida, me fascina.
🍂
Gracias a ella se que leeré a Colette (aún pendiente en mi vida). Gracias a ella sabré poner palabras al amor que siento por Natalia Ginzburg desde la primera vez que me acerqué a ella con «Léxico familiar».
🍂
Y lo más curioso de todo es que yo, que releo poco, releí hace unos meses «Apegos feroces», (re)temblé aún más que la primera vez y ahora sé que con Gornick siempre tendré una «Cuenta pendiente».
🍂
Prescripción especial: si te gusta Gornick, te gustará este libro. Si no lo sabes aún, comienza por «Apegos feroces» y que tu instinto lector te guíe.
🍂
#VivianGornick #CuentasPendientes #AutorasReferentes #ReleerEsRevivir #RelecturaYRecuerdo #CríticaLiterariaFeminista
📖 «Cuentas pendientes» (2020)
Traduce: Julia Osuna Aguilar
Edita: @sextopiso_es
🍂
«Como la mayoría de lectores, a veces creo que nací leyendo», afirma Gornick en la introducción del libro. Con esta frase me siento identificada. «No leo novela contemporánea», afirmó Gornick en una entrevista reciente. Con esta frase no, de lo contrario no estaría leyéndola a ella. Pero sí hay un aprendizaje que extraigo de estas «Cuentas pendientes»: el misterio insondable para nosotras, lectoras, de la relectura.
🍂
Yo releo poco, Gornick relee mucho, y de ahí sale este ensayo-memoria en el que compara a la Gornick pasada, temblando con un libro por primera vez, con la Gornick presente buscando ese mismo temblor en la relectura.
🍂
Hay autoras que aguantan, incluso crecen, con el repaso (Colette, Duras, Bowen). Otros autores, sin embargo, no atraviesan ya la piel cicatrizada por la vida y la experiencia lectora crítica (D.H. Lawrence, Schwartz).
🍂
Lo más maravilloso no es solo ver cómo esa Gornick (mujer-lectora) ha ido evolucionando con el tiempo, sino sumergirnos, como si retirásemos una cortinilla para cotillear, en la vida íntima de la autora. Gornick trenza su vida con los libros, comparte con nosotras reflexiones, secretos, como una amiga que nos susurra con una copa de vino en la mano. Ese intimismo, esa sabiduría compartida, me fascina.
🍂
Gracias a ella se que leeré a Colette (aún pendiente en mi vida). Gracias a ella sabré poner palabras al amor que siento por Natalia Ginzburg desde la primera vez que me acerqué a ella con «Léxico familiar».
🍂
Y lo más curioso de todo es que yo, que releo poco, releí hace unos meses «Apegos feroces», (re)temblé aún más que la primera vez y ahora sé que con Gornick siempre tendré una «Cuenta pendiente».
🍂
Prescripción especial: si te gusta Gornick, te gustará este libro. Si no lo sabes aún, comienza por «Apegos feroces» y que tu instinto lector te guíe.
🍂
#VivianGornick #CuentasPendientes #AutorasReferentes #ReleerEsRevivir #RelecturaYRecuerdo #CríticaLiterariaFeminista
December 3, 2019
What a complete pleasure this book was! I loved listening to Gornick ruminate over her layered impressions of books throughout the course of her life. It made me pull too many books off the shelf in the hopes of (somehow) finding time to reread old favorites. It also made me wish more people took on this project. It should be a column somewhere! But, really, Gornick’s keen memory, honest impressions, and incredible prose made this book sing. This doesn’t feel like a vanity project (as it may with others); her clear voice encourages you to challenge yourself and your memories.
April 14, 2021
”The only advice. . . that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
Virginia Wolff, How Should One Read a Book? (p. 23)
”It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question.” Unfinished Business, Introduction
Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader was published when she was eighty-five years old, after what she recalls as a lifetime of reading: ”Like most readers, I sometimes think that 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.” Her lifetime of reading—say, over at least seventy-five years—gives Gornick the opportunity to return, again and again, to the same novels, The books that Gornick discusses in Unfinished Business range widely, from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers all the way to Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Many authors discussed by Gornick—yes, Lawrence, as well as Colette, Duras and several others—I’ve never read; others—Natalia Ginzburg, J. L. Carr—I’ve read extensively. But Unfinished Business interests less for what Gornick re-reads, and more for why and how she re-reads.
I suspect that reading Unfinished Business will have a lasting impact on my own re-reading. Up to now, my re-reading of novels read over about sixty-five years is somewhat random. I often re-read because I fondly recall reading a particular novel from decades ago, sometimes to remind myself of plot or character details, occasionally because bookish friends are reading the novel and I want to join them. I’ve re-read some novels by favorite authors multiple times: Anita Brookner’s Look At Me and Latecomers, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth and Dora Bruder, Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum and Where the Dead Sit Talking as examples. But rarely do I reread a novel expecting to find new understandings or messages.
Finding the time and psychic energy to reread proves difficult for me: it requires temporarily abandoning the minor thrill of cracking open the covers of new book (or a new .mobi file) and the allures of remaining current with literary prize lists and book reviews of often questionable worth. After reading Unfinishesd Business, now I hope to recognize re-reading as equally and differently rewarding than reading, and not lesser. But where to start? With favorite novels already re-read or those not yet re-read? With novels seemingly well understood when read earlier, or with novels that confused or bewildered me? With Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain, the first novel that I remember reading and enjoying? Yes, perhaps with Johnny Tremain, hoping to regain that very first thrill of being engrossed and enthralled by fiction, by a good story well told.
”If we could banish all. . . preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this. . .” How Should One Read a Book? (p. 26)
4.5 stars
Virginia Wolff, How Should One Read a Book? (p. 23)
”It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question.” Unfinished Business, Introduction
Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader was published when she was eighty-five years old, after what she recalls as a lifetime of reading: ”Like most readers, I sometimes think that 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.” Her lifetime of reading—say, over at least seventy-five years—gives Gornick the opportunity to return, again and again, to the same novels, The books that Gornick discusses in Unfinished Business range widely, from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers all the way to Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Many authors discussed by Gornick—yes, Lawrence, as well as Colette, Duras and several others—I’ve never read; others—Natalia Ginzburg, J. L. Carr—I’ve read extensively. But Unfinished Business interests less for what Gornick re-reads, and more for why and how she re-reads.
I suspect that reading Unfinished Business will have a lasting impact on my own re-reading. Up to now, my re-reading of novels read over about sixty-five years is somewhat random. I often re-read because I fondly recall reading a particular novel from decades ago, sometimes to remind myself of plot or character details, occasionally because bookish friends are reading the novel and I want to join them. I’ve re-read some novels by favorite authors multiple times: Anita Brookner’s Look At Me and Latecomers, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth and Dora Bruder, Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum and Where the Dead Sit Talking as examples. But rarely do I reread a novel expecting to find new understandings or messages.
Finding the time and psychic energy to reread proves difficult for me: it requires temporarily abandoning the minor thrill of cracking open the covers of new book (or a new .mobi file) and the allures of remaining current with literary prize lists and book reviews of often questionable worth. After reading Unfinishesd Business, now I hope to recognize re-reading as equally and differently rewarding than reading, and not lesser. But where to start? With favorite novels already re-read or those not yet re-read? With novels seemingly well understood when read earlier, or with novels that confused or bewildered me? With Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain, the first novel that I remember reading and enjoying? Yes, perhaps with Johnny Tremain, hoping to regain that very first thrill of being engrossed and enthralled by fiction, by a good story well told.
”If we could banish all. . . preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this. . .” How Should One Read a Book? (p. 26)
4.5 stars
April 14, 2021
”The only advice. . . that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”
Virginia Wolff, How Should One Read a Book? (p. 23)
”It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question.” Unfinished Business, Introduction
Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader was published when she was eighty-five years old, after what she recalls as a lifetime of reading: ”Like most readers, I sometimes think that 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.” Her lifetime of reading—say, over at least seventy-five years—gives Gornick the opportunity to return, again and again, to the same novels, The books that Gornick discusses in Unfinished Business range widely, from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers all the way to Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Many authors discussed by Gornick—yes, Lawrence, as well as Colette, Duras and several others—I’ve never read; others—Natalia Ginzburg, J. L. Carr—I’ve read extensively. But Unfinished Business interests less for what Gornick re-reads, and more for why and how she re-reads.
I suspect that reading Unfinished Business will have a lasting impact on my own re-reading. Up to now, my re-reading of novels read over about sixty-five years is somewhat random. I often re-read because I fondly recall reading a particular novel from decades ago, sometimes to remind myself of plot or character details, occasionally because bookish friends are reading the novel and I want to join them. I’ve re-read some novels by favorite authors multiple times: Anita Brookner’s Look At Me and Latecomers, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth and Dora Bruder, Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum and Where the Dead Sit Talking as examples. But rarely do I reread a novel expecting to find new understandings or messages.
Finding the time and psychic energy to reread proves difficult for me: it requires temporarily abandoning the minor thrill of cracking open the covers of new book (or a new .mobi file) and the allures of remaining current with literary prize lists and book reviews of often questionable worth. After reading Unfinishesd Business, now I hope to recognize re-reading as equally and differently rewarding than reading, and not lesser. But where to start? With favorite novels already re-read or those not yet re-read? With novels seemingly well understood when read earlier, or with novels that confused or bewildered me? With Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain, the first novel that I remember reading and enjoying? Yes, perhaps with Johnny Tremain, hoping to regain that very first thrill of being engrossed and enthralled by fiction, by a good story well told.
”If we could banish all. . . preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this. . .” How Should One Read a Book? (p. 26)
4.5 stars
Virginia Wolff, How Should One Read a Book? (p. 23)
”It has often been my experience that re-reading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question.” Unfinished Business, Introduction
Vivian Gornick’s Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader was published when she was eighty-five years old, after what she recalls as a lifetime of reading: ”Like most readers, I sometimes think that 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.” Her lifetime of reading—say, over at least seventy-five years—gives Gornick the opportunity to return, again and again, to the same novels, The books that Gornick discusses in Unfinished Business range widely, from D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers all the way to Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats. Many authors discussed by Gornick—yes, Lawrence, as well as Colette, Duras and several others—I’ve never read; others—Natalia Ginzburg, J. L. Carr—I’ve read extensively. But Unfinished Business interests less for what Gornick re-reads, and more for why and how she re-reads.
I suspect that reading Unfinished Business will have a lasting impact on my own re-reading. Up to now, my re-reading of novels read over about sixty-five years is somewhat random. I often re-read because I fondly recall reading a particular novel from decades ago, sometimes to remind myself of plot or character details, occasionally because bookish friends are reading the novel and I want to join them. I’ve re-read some novels by favorite authors multiple times: Anita Brookner’s Look At Me and Latecomers, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth and Dora Bruder, Brandon Hobson’s Deep Ellum and Where the Dead Sit Talking as examples. But rarely do I reread a novel expecting to find new understandings or messages.
Finding the time and psychic energy to reread proves difficult for me: it requires temporarily abandoning the minor thrill of cracking open the covers of new book (or a new .mobi file) and the allures of remaining current with literary prize lists and book reviews of often questionable worth. After reading Unfinishesd Business, now I hope to recognize re-reading as equally and differently rewarding than reading, and not lesser. But where to start? With favorite novels already re-read or those not yet re-read? With novels seemingly well understood when read earlier, or with novels that confused or bewildered me? With Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain, the first novel that I remember reading and enjoying? Yes, perhaps with Johnny Tremain, hoping to regain that very first thrill of being engrossed and enthralled by fiction, by a good story well told.
”If we could banish all. . . preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this. . .” How Should One Read a Book? (p. 26)
4.5 stars
September 23, 2025
Este es el segundo libro de la Gornick que leo y siento que nada más no conecto con su forma de escribir. Sé que es una de las grandes pensadoras y escritoras feministas del siglo XX, pero no sé: hay algo en su escritura que me da la sensación de desapego, como si ella todo lo observara y analizara desde afuera pero sin mostrar en algún momento pasión o emoción al respecto. Sin duda es una cuestión meramente de estilo y de gusto, pero no miento al decir que inicié este libro unas tres veces y dudaba de si valía la pena continuar.
En un libro de ensayos sobre la relectura, esperaba más: desbordamiento, pasión, más conexión entre la relectura y las experiencias de la autora y siento que no estaba ahí. Si bien nos dice cómo se sintió la primera vez que leyó tal o cual libro, señalando que en ocasiones no fue el momento o cómo descubrió otros mundos en la relectura, hay una seriedad y una sensación de agobio. Es claro: no todos los libros son alegres o emotivos, pero creo que en las relecturas de nuestros buenos libros, encontramos más aristas, más detalles y conocemos nuevos aspectos de ese mundo. O los odiamos y nos cuestionamos aspectos que antes no nos parecieron problemáticos o aburridos, y ahora sí. En mi opinión, Gornick no logra esto.
Además, he de reconocer que recientemente hay algo que me genera conflicto de escritores y escrotiras cuyas obras de referencia son únicamente anglosajonas o europeas.
Ahí, lo dije.
Al final cada quien lee lo que quiere, pero si buscamos ampliar nuestros marcos de referencia, nuestro entendimiento del mundo, creo que hay que leer desde otras perspectivas. Tal vez sea injusto esperar que Gornick hubiera leído a Elena Garro o a Silvina Ocampo (desaparecidas de la narrativa latinoamericana durante prácticamente todo el siglo XX y mucho menos traducidas a otros idiomas), pero ya de mínimo la aparición de un Cervantes, de un Borges o de Achebe (o cualquier escritor de África) le hubieran dado riqueza (de nuevo, esto desde mi opinión) a la narrativa de la autora.
Creo que daré una última oportunidad a Gornick, pues en principio, muchos de sus títulos me interesan, pero siento que su estilo posiblemente no es para mí. Con todo, rescato una frase que me pareció preciosa del libro y creo puede ser temor compartido por muchos lectores:
En un libro de ensayos sobre la relectura, esperaba más: desbordamiento, pasión, más conexión entre la relectura y las experiencias de la autora y siento que no estaba ahí. Si bien nos dice cómo se sintió la primera vez que leyó tal o cual libro, señalando que en ocasiones no fue el momento o cómo descubrió otros mundos en la relectura, hay una seriedad y una sensación de agobio. Es claro: no todos los libros son alegres o emotivos, pero creo que en las relecturas de nuestros buenos libros, encontramos más aristas, más detalles y conocemos nuevos aspectos de ese mundo. O los odiamos y nos cuestionamos aspectos que antes no nos parecieron problemáticos o aburridos, y ahora sí. En mi opinión, Gornick no logra esto.
Además, he de reconocer que recientemente hay algo que me genera conflicto de escritores y escrotiras cuyas obras de referencia son únicamente anglosajonas o europeas.
Ahí, lo dije.
Al final cada quien lee lo que quiere, pero si buscamos ampliar nuestros marcos de referencia, nuestro entendimiento del mundo, creo que hay que leer desde otras perspectivas. Tal vez sea injusto esperar que Gornick hubiera leído a Elena Garro o a Silvina Ocampo (desaparecidas de la narrativa latinoamericana durante prácticamente todo el siglo XX y mucho menos traducidas a otros idiomas), pero ya de mínimo la aparición de un Cervantes, de un Borges o de Achebe (o cualquier escritor de África) le hubieran dado riqueza (de nuevo, esto desde mi opinión) a la narrativa de la autora.
Creo que daré una última oportunidad a Gornick, pues en principio, muchos de sus títulos me interesan, pero siento que su estilo posiblemente no es para mí. Con todo, rescato una frase que me pareció preciosa del libro y creo puede ser temor compartido por muchos lectores:
"...y luego me estremezco un poco más cuando pienso en todos los buenos libros que no estaba de humor para comprender la primera vez que los leí, ya los que nunca he vuelto. No me importa el hecho de que haber leído una sola vez un libro pueda haberme llevado a ensalzar una mediocridad -puedo vivir con ello-, pero al través...Eso me oprime el corazón."
March 25, 2022
Nunca he estado de acuerdo con la gente que dice que no le gusta leer. Pienso que se equivocan. No es que no les guste leer: es que no han encontrado un libro que les atrape, les seduzca y les arrebata todos los prejuicios que tienen sobre la literatura.
Siendo profesora me encuentro comentarios de este tipo a diario, y no es fácil enseñarles a los alumnos que hay tipos y tipos de texto y que cada uno de ellos tiene que encontrar el suyo. A veces lo consigo y eso es lo más gratificante del mundo. El que un niño o niña de 14 años me diga: “profe, mola mucho, ¿encontraré libros parecidos a este?” me llena de satisfacción.
Y sí. Claro que los encontrarás. Porque todos tenemos nuestros gustos personales y libros que nos están esperando a la vuelta de la esquina.
Vivian Gornick habla precisamente un poco de eso: ella, como yo, es alguien que descubre que, según el momento vital en el que se encuentra, el mismo libro le puede parecer lo más maravilloso del mundo o lo más aburrido que ha tenido entre manos. El sentir una cosa u otra es cuestión de actitud, de ánimo y de verse a uno mismo en ese momento. De conocerse.
Si en ese momento de mi vida no estoy pasando por un buen momento amoroso, no puedo pretender empatizar con una protagonista de la época romántica que lo único que hace es hornear pasteles y escribir poemas a su amante. La encontraré patética y ridícula.
Si años después, mi situación vital ha cambiado totalmente y hago una re-lectura del libro, ¿qué ocurrirá? El personaje será siendo el mismo: no habrá evolucionado. La que habré madurado soy yo. Estaré en una nueva etapa. Veré otros matices que antes no había visto. Como persona habré cambiado y me parecerá, por arte de magia, que esa protagonista también. Ya no será ridícula: a lo mejor será, sencillamente, una pobre enamorada.
Cuando decimos que aprendemos con un libro es precisamente eso: aprendemos porque nos hace darnos cuenta de quiénes éramos y de quiénes somos ahora que volvemos de nuevo a ese momento: a esa vida que ya no somos y que hemos dejado atrás.
Siendo profesora me encuentro comentarios de este tipo a diario, y no es fácil enseñarles a los alumnos que hay tipos y tipos de texto y que cada uno de ellos tiene que encontrar el suyo. A veces lo consigo y eso es lo más gratificante del mundo. El que un niño o niña de 14 años me diga: “profe, mola mucho, ¿encontraré libros parecidos a este?” me llena de satisfacción.
Y sí. Claro que los encontrarás. Porque todos tenemos nuestros gustos personales y libros que nos están esperando a la vuelta de la esquina.
Vivian Gornick habla precisamente un poco de eso: ella, como yo, es alguien que descubre que, según el momento vital en el que se encuentra, el mismo libro le puede parecer lo más maravilloso del mundo o lo más aburrido que ha tenido entre manos. El sentir una cosa u otra es cuestión de actitud, de ánimo y de verse a uno mismo en ese momento. De conocerse.
Si en ese momento de mi vida no estoy pasando por un buen momento amoroso, no puedo pretender empatizar con una protagonista de la época romántica que lo único que hace es hornear pasteles y escribir poemas a su amante. La encontraré patética y ridícula.
Si años después, mi situación vital ha cambiado totalmente y hago una re-lectura del libro, ¿qué ocurrirá? El personaje será siendo el mismo: no habrá evolucionado. La que habré madurado soy yo. Estaré en una nueva etapa. Veré otros matices que antes no había visto. Como persona habré cambiado y me parecerá, por arte de magia, que esa protagonista también. Ya no será ridícula: a lo mejor será, sencillamente, una pobre enamorada.
Cuando decimos que aprendemos con un libro es precisamente eso: aprendemos porque nos hace darnos cuenta de quiénes éramos y de quiénes somos ahora que volvemos de nuevo a ese momento: a esa vida que ya no somos y que hemos dejado atrás.
August 18, 2024
Leggere è come il lavorìo incessante di una mente mai paga, mai abbastanza stanca da lasciarsi andare, da mollare finalmente la presa. Leggere vuol dire cercare sè stessi in ogni storia, in ogni personaggio, in ogni parola più o meno casuale che l’autore ha vergato sulla carta ancor prima che noi nascessimo.
Quando si ama la lettura non sembra ci sia mai stato un momento passato senza un libro in mano, la nostra vita ruota tutta intorno a quell’odore di carta nuova, a quelle pagine spesse e un po’ consunte, alle incerte e appassionate sottolineature che non ricordavamo di aver fatto e che, ora, ci appaiono indecifrabili.
La realtà stessa, gli avvenimenti, gli appuntamenti, gli amori, sono plasmati da ciò che stavamo leggendo, dai nostri gusti del momento, dagli autori del cuore che – come veggenti – paiono in grado di predire il nostro futuro anche dagli angusti confini dell’al di là, di leggere all’interno dei nostri cuori e delle nostre menti quasi fossimo anche noi uno dei tanti personaggi inventati da loro.
E, in fondo, è questo che sentiamo di essere il più delle volte: incapaci di spingere il nostro sguardo nelle profondità dell’essere, della nostra anima fragile e dolorante, quasi diveniamo irreali, trasparenti, ci aggiriamo nella vita senza peso e senza forma, sospinti solo da qualche rara epifania, da qualche sciocco e frenetico impulso. Quante volte abbiamo pensato – leggendo – di capire finalmente qualcosa di noi stessi e quante volte, presi dalla frenesia della vita, ce ne siamo dimenticati? Quante volte abbiamo continuato a sbagliare, a nasconderci le verità più dolorose?
Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...
Quando si ama la lettura non sembra ci sia mai stato un momento passato senza un libro in mano, la nostra vita ruota tutta intorno a quell’odore di carta nuova, a quelle pagine spesse e un po’ consunte, alle incerte e appassionate sottolineature che non ricordavamo di aver fatto e che, ora, ci appaiono indecifrabili.
La realtà stessa, gli avvenimenti, gli appuntamenti, gli amori, sono plasmati da ciò che stavamo leggendo, dai nostri gusti del momento, dagli autori del cuore che – come veggenti – paiono in grado di predire il nostro futuro anche dagli angusti confini dell’al di là, di leggere all’interno dei nostri cuori e delle nostre menti quasi fossimo anche noi uno dei tanti personaggi inventati da loro.
E, in fondo, è questo che sentiamo di essere il più delle volte: incapaci di spingere il nostro sguardo nelle profondità dell’essere, della nostra anima fragile e dolorante, quasi diveniamo irreali, trasparenti, ci aggiriamo nella vita senza peso e senza forma, sospinti solo da qualche rara epifania, da qualche sciocco e frenetico impulso. Quante volte abbiamo pensato – leggendo – di capire finalmente qualcosa di noi stessi e quante volte, presi dalla frenesia della vita, ce ne siamo dimenticati? Quante volte abbiamo continuato a sbagliare, a nasconderci le verità più dolorose?
Continua a leggere qui: https://parlaredilibri.wordpress.com/...
January 27, 2023
Em 2022, tive a oportunidade de ler (e ficar fascinado por) The odd woman and the city de Vivian Gornick, pelo que decidi ler outras de suas obras, e foi ótima essa oportunidade de descobrir o livro que no momento resenho, que no original se chama Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader.
Uma constatação é que em geral Gornick é bastante memorialista em sua escrita, mesmo que se trata de um livro sobre suas andanças e encontros com amigos e conhecidos em Nova Iorque, ou quando fala de livros.
Cuentas pendientes trata de releituras de obras que fizemos no passado, as quais pensamos que alcançamos um bom entendimento e, quando as relemos, percebemos outras interpretações, virtudes, ganhos (e por vezes, perdas). Nós também evoluimos no decorrer da vida e embora o avançar da idade (ainda) seja visto com preconceito, a maturidade é um ganho e tanto, é a oportunidade de ver o mundo e a vida com outros olhos, outra sensibilidade. De fato, quando pensamos em nossos "eus" no decorrer da vida, percebemos o quanto amadurecemos e ganhamos outros talentos, capacidades e sensibilidades, inclusive para refazer uma leitura.
(Um aparte: confesso que há pessoas que não amadurecem, mas permanecem em estado de vegetal, mesmo que os anos passem, mas não conseguem "pensar", apenas repetir o que os outros dizem.)
Vivian Gornick faz releituras tão cativantes ao inserir memórias e momentos de vida, que é de pedir mais. Algumas dessas obras, eu pretendo ler durante esse ano. Vivian Gornick é um prazer e tanto!
Uma constatação é que em geral Gornick é bastante memorialista em sua escrita, mesmo que se trata de um livro sobre suas andanças e encontros com amigos e conhecidos em Nova Iorque, ou quando fala de livros.
Cuentas pendientes trata de releituras de obras que fizemos no passado, as quais pensamos que alcançamos um bom entendimento e, quando as relemos, percebemos outras interpretações, virtudes, ganhos (e por vezes, perdas). Nós também evoluimos no decorrer da vida e embora o avançar da idade (ainda) seja visto com preconceito, a maturidade é um ganho e tanto, é a oportunidade de ver o mundo e a vida com outros olhos, outra sensibilidade. De fato, quando pensamos em nossos "eus" no decorrer da vida, percebemos o quanto amadurecemos e ganhamos outros talentos, capacidades e sensibilidades, inclusive para refazer uma leitura.
(Um aparte: confesso que há pessoas que não amadurecem, mas permanecem em estado de vegetal, mesmo que os anos passem, mas não conseguem "pensar", apenas repetir o que os outros dizem.)
Vivian Gornick faz releituras tão cativantes ao inserir memórias e momentos de vida, que é de pedir mais. Algumas dessas obras, eu pretendo ler durante esse ano. Vivian Gornick é um prazer e tanto!
April 1, 2021
Do books read the same years apart? Are our memories the same even hours apart? Time the separator sure, but what makes a re-read read different? It's US, as reader who, what? changes the landscape? I've been rereading quite a bit over these last several years and thinking about how sucessive, years apart reading, is almost as illuminating as a diary might yield insight into psyche ids an odds. What didn't we see first go? Books are live though carved in stone. So are we.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2021...
January 31, 2022
siempre me ha gustado volver a libros que ya he leído. no sabría decirte la de veces que he leído las leyendas de becquer, el Miguel Strogoff de Verne o la escala de los mapas de Gopegui. Y en todas esas relecturas, tal y como afirma y confirma #viviangornick en #cuentaspendientes, soy una persona diferente que acude a una historia y personajes que también se muestran diferentes a aquella otra vez. pero ¿ por qué ocurre eso? ¿será porque tanto el texto como yo estamos vivos y como tal nos movemos juntos en caminos paralelos?
.
#viviangornick recoge en #cuentaspendientes una selección de lecturas a las que ha acudido de manera recurrente a lo largo de su trayectoria tanto personal como en su faceta de escritora. Revisa con minuciosidad como esos textos la marcaron con mayor o menor grado de intensidad hasta como recordaba a los personajes por detalles especiales para cuando, y con gran sorpresa, por diversas circunstancias, esos libros vuelven a sus manos, descubrir cómo la historia, a la que no se le ha movido ni una coma, parece otra totalmente. Así D. H Lawrence, Colette, Elizabeth Bowen o Natalia Ginzburg o Duras la conducen hacia nuevas perspectivas que siempre han estado ahí esperando su propio momento.
.
Díez breves capítulos donde vivían Gornick repasa a velocidad crucero su vida y sus lecturas, sus aciertos y errores, sus subidas y bajadas en busca de algo parecido a Ithaca que no deja de ser nuestro propio yo a lo largo de la travesía que es la vida. Gornick se acompaña de obras, ya a temporales, a modo de mapa o brújula para tener presente, en todo momento, hacia donde poner la dirección correcta.
.
#viviangornick recoge en #cuentaspendientes una selección de lecturas a las que ha acudido de manera recurrente a lo largo de su trayectoria tanto personal como en su faceta de escritora. Revisa con minuciosidad como esos textos la marcaron con mayor o menor grado de intensidad hasta como recordaba a los personajes por detalles especiales para cuando, y con gran sorpresa, por diversas circunstancias, esos libros vuelven a sus manos, descubrir cómo la historia, a la que no se le ha movido ni una coma, parece otra totalmente. Así D. H Lawrence, Colette, Elizabeth Bowen o Natalia Ginzburg o Duras la conducen hacia nuevas perspectivas que siempre han estado ahí esperando su propio momento.
.
Díez breves capítulos donde vivían Gornick repasa a velocidad crucero su vida y sus lecturas, sus aciertos y errores, sus subidas y bajadas en busca de algo parecido a Ithaca que no deja de ser nuestro propio yo a lo largo de la travesía que es la vida. Gornick se acompaña de obras, ya a temporales, a modo de mapa o brújula para tener presente, en todo momento, hacia donde poner la dirección correcta.
May 29, 2020
The painful thing about Gornick's re-readings is that all of them are rejected on revisit — neither Duras's appetite, Colette’s independence, or Sue Bridehead's abstinence hold up. Same. I’m a faint 200 pp into re-reading Middlemarch and can’t bear Dorothea’s choice. Don’t do it. I know. I’ve read this before.
But then, reading new with Gornick? Always a pleasure:
But then, reading new with Gornick? Always a pleasure:
“Tolstoy once said that if he was asked to write on social or political questions, he would not waste one word on the subject, but if asked to write a book which twenty years from the time it was written would make people laugh and cry and love life more, to this he would bend all his efforts.”
November 27, 2023
i know i love a book about books but it was very nice to read a book specifically about the act of rereading and what it can offer you. i’m in a big revisiting place right now, especially going back to things i was reading ten years ago at 18 years of age and it’s very fun to see what those things evoke in me now :) thanks vivian for the book recs and the company
March 13, 2022
El estilo de Vivian Gornick es el que busco en cualquier referente cultural ahora mismo: un estilo en el que lo personal influye en la escritura y las vivencias propias se reflejan incluso en los ficticio.
Lo que demuestra este libro es que Gornick no sólo aplica esto a la escritura, sino también a la lectura. Me encanta cómo cuenta las sensaciones que tuvo al leer diferentes libros según su momento de vida, es que a quién no le ha pasado!! Además, aprovecha las reflexiones sobre sus relecturas para tratar temas como la identidad, la angustia vital, el amor... Y todo lo que tiene que decir es interesantísimo.
En mi camino de regreso a leer novelas, este libro es un empujoncito muy bueno para disfrutar de la ficción.
Lo que demuestra este libro es que Gornick no sólo aplica esto a la escritura, sino también a la lectura. Me encanta cómo cuenta las sensaciones que tuvo al leer diferentes libros según su momento de vida, es que a quién no le ha pasado!! Además, aprovecha las reflexiones sobre sus relecturas para tratar temas como la identidad, la angustia vital, el amor... Y todo lo que tiene que decir es interesantísimo.
En mi camino de regreso a leer novelas, este libro es un empujoncito muy bueno para disfrutar de la ficción.
Read
September 18, 2022I came across this book on display right at the front of the Ortega branch of the San Francisco public library - maybe the display was about...reading? Whatever it was, it was a lovely way to discover this book, which I picked up for its intriguing title. It was only once I looked a little closer that I realized Gornick is an author I have been hearing about for a long time, and have been meaning to read. I didn't get a ton out of this particular book, as I wasn't even familiar with most of the books she references, but it is easily worth it just for the introduction, which is immediately gripping and engaging, and made me think about memory, books, and rereading - how much we can reflect on how we have changed when we revisit books and consider what we thought we had read.
May 3, 2025
No leí ninguno de los libros de los que habla y tampoco me dieron ganas.
December 11, 2022
siempre me h negado a releer la mayoría de los libros porque me abrumo con todos los que aún no he leído, pero que ganas de repente de desconocerme y reconocerme a mí misma a través de ellos.
March 5, 2020
This is not a book that I meant to pick up. I've never read anything written by Vivian Gornick ever. I don't have the same lived in experience as her. I certainly don't have the same taste in reading as she does. But I didn't think I'd get lit-crit about a few books that she has re-read over time, I thought it would be a more general approach to rereading. I have read a few of the books or authors she mentions, but none really made a mark, and Gornick didn't sell them enough, except for Pat Barker's Regeneration, which I already wanted to read. Maybe the J. L. Carr too, if I can get my hands on it.
She has had better luck with her rereads than I have. I used to reread books far more often when I was younger, when I wouldn't let enough time pass between two reads of a book, when I was essentially the same person with the same views. It worked, because in India access to books did not come cheap. Rereading was essential if I didn't want to end up broke. But then I came to the US, and discovered its wonderful library system, and suddenly I had so many books that I didn't have to reread any book ever again. The ones that I did read again, left a bad taste in my mouth - (*Little Women*).
I was really hoping this book would make me appreciate the joys of re-reading, because sometimes it can be rewarding, but I didn't find any of that, except for the confirmation that people change, ideas change, and you notice different things at different times because of your mood, the side of the bed you woke up on, or because different issues matter more or less to you now. I don't mean to sound superior, but I already knew that. On the plus side, Gornick's writing is great. I'd read another topic by her without hesitation.
She has had better luck with her rereads than I have. I used to reread books far more often when I was younger, when I wouldn't let enough time pass between two reads of a book, when I was essentially the same person with the same views. It worked, because in India access to books did not come cheap. Rereading was essential if I didn't want to end up broke. But then I came to the US, and discovered its wonderful library system, and suddenly I had so many books that I didn't have to reread any book ever again. The ones that I did read again, left a bad taste in my mouth - (*Little Women*).
I was really hoping this book would make me appreciate the joys of re-reading, because sometimes it can be rewarding, but I didn't find any of that, except for the confirmation that people change, ideas change, and you notice different things at different times because of your mood, the side of the bed you woke up on, or because different issues matter more or less to you now. I don't mean to sound superior, but I already knew that. On the plus side, Gornick's writing is great. I'd read another topic by her without hesitation.
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