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“Striking a balance in my reading these days is a challenge, like so much else. I want reading with feeling, but not too much; reading with truth, but not too much; reading with poignancy, but certainly not too much. Unfinished Business hit this slippery target beautifully. I was ready for this book, ready in the way Gornick defines it: "responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader—no less than between people—is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness.” It is with that stark perceptiveness that Gornick revisits her life’s reading and re-reading of a handful of favorite authors. Her connection to the characters, plots, and themes shifts with each reading, so all the while she is crafting beautiful reflections on her own life’s unfolding. It’s a book I wish I could read for the first time again and again to capture its magic, though I suppose I will have to be content to simply re-read it.”
— Kim • Phinney Books
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.”
Vivian Gornick is the author of several acclaimed books, including Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past fifty years by the New York Times Book Review in 2019; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for the Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications.
Vivian Gornick is the author of several acclaimed books, including Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past fifty years by the New York Times Book Review in 2019; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She began her career as a staff writer for the Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, the New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many other publications.
Reviews
“Wry, incisive and characteristically captivating, Gornick’s latest book is a tribute to the value of returning to the same authors at different points in one’s life.”
“Vivacious and highly recommended.”
“A commitment to class consciousness, cultural politics, gender, and close reading—not only of literature but of daily human relationships.”
“Part memoir, part feminist literary analysis, and wholly engaging.”
“Gornick recognizes that in [an] initial encounter, one might not be emotionally ready to appreciate a work fully but with each rereading will recognize a new literary element or better understand a particular protagonist no matter how many times the book has been perused before. A delightful entry for lovers of literature and literary criticism.”
“Literature knows few champions as ardent and insightful—or as uncompromising—as Gornick, which is to readers’ good fortune.”
“Through steady, sculpted prose and elegant readings, Gornick concludes the work of great literature is less about ‘the transporting pleasure of the story itself’ than revealing readers to themselves…The insights in this rich work will be appreciated by Gornick fans and bibliophiles alike.”
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