Gornick, Vivian. _Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader_, 2020. [https://archivesquebec.libraryreserve.com/ContentDetails.htm?id=4739625](https://archivesquebec.libraryreserve.com/ContentDetails.htm?id=4739625). # Progressive Summary It's a testament to Vivian Gornick's account of her lifetime of re-reading books that I immediately wanted to re-read it upon finishing it. In some of the best prose that I've ever read, she provides captivating summaries of books she's read, accompanied by profound reflections on the mysteriousness of her own soul and that of her fellow humans. She tracks her own progress as a feminist through her changing interpretations of the books. She proves to us that books are amongst the best instruments for self-discovery. There were quite a number of books that she made me want to read. She made me fall in love with literature all over again. # Key Points She never felt she had to be a Jewish-in-America writer, like Saul Bellow or Philip Roth. Only the boys were being raised to find their place in America. The girls were simply expected to marry those boys. *Literature and the hunger for connection* I can't help feeling that Gornick would appreciate Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication. So many of her observations are about the tragic strategies that literary protagonists pursue to meet their beautiful needs. > Once again, I found myself reading differently. I took out the books— novels in particular—I had read and re-read, 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 (as though coming from the primeval unconscious) 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 the achievement of wholeness of being but of the ingrained effort made on its behalf. # Quotes ## Introduction > Like most readers, 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. On vacation with family or friends, I am quite capable of settling myself, book in hand, on the living-room couch in a beautiful country house and hardly stirring out into the glorious green for which we have all come. > The companionateness of those books! Of all books. Nothing can match it. It’s the longing for coherence inscribed in the work— that extraordinary attempt at shaping the inchoate through words—it brings peace and excitement, comfort and consolation. But above all, it’s the sheer relief from the chaos in the head that reading delivers. Sometimes I think it alone provides me with courage for life, and has from earliest childhood. > I read ever and only to feel the power of Life with a capital L as it manifested itself (thrillingly) through the protagonist’s engagement with those external forces beyond his or her control. > I STILL READ to feel the power of Life with a capital L. I still see the protagonist in thrall to forces beyond his or her control. And when I write I still hope to put my readers behind my eyes, experience the subject as I have experienced it, feel it viscerally as I have felt it. What follows is a collection of pieces written in appreciation of the literary enterprise as I have encountered it through the reading and re-reading of books that made me feel anew all of the above. ## DH Lawrence > Lawrence was writing at the beginning of the Freudian century, the time when Western culture was on the verge of validating his own inner torment. His metaphor—the repression of the erotic—was, in fact, to become the wedge that modernism used to pry open the uncharted territory of human consciousness. If Lawrence were alive today, this metaphor would not be available to him because today all have had long experience of the sexual freedom once denied, and have discovered firsthand that the making of a self from the inside out is not to be achieved through the senses alone. 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. > Modernity was pushing all writers to put on the page the entire truth of whatever it was the writer found festering in the human psyche: not only sorrow and disorder, but sadism, alienation, and the brevity of passion. > It soon developed that writing became central to my life. That is, I found that when I sat down to write, the me who entertained a myriad of anxieties and insecurities seemed to disappear. There, at the desk, with a piece of paper in front of me, my fingers now on a keyboard, wholly absorbed by the effort to order my thoughts, I felt safe, centered, untouchable: at once both excited and at peace, no longer distracted or unfocused or hungry for the things I didn’t have. 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 alive to myself—real to myself—that writing gave me. > I knew how long and comparatively undamaged a life it took to admit of nuance, take in complexity, welcome second thoughts. > > In service to class struggle (or women’s rights, for that matter) I have experienced many times those deliciously hard-edged feelings Billy had whenever he was ripping off authority, and I know while in their grip one imagines oneself bold, free, liberated. But unnuanced freedom is no freedom at all. It’s the nuance that makes us act like civilized human beings, even when we do not feel like civilized human beings. Do away with nuance and it’s all animal life; in other words, war. I was grateful that I’d been allowed a life that had taken me from that single-mind-bloodlust to the pain and confusion brought on by the gap in myself between practice and theory, the one that forced on me recognition of all the human exceptions to the ideological rule. I realized then that because my life had been sufficiently free of catastrophe I remained equipped with a renewable spirit that had often been laid low but never done in.