Vivian Gornick: The odd woman and the city (2015)
175 pages
English language
Published April 6, 2015
"A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; …
"A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis"--
En nydelig liten bok med gatevandring i New York City. Hva er grunnen til at så mange av de beste bøkene er historier om mennesker som går gatelangs?
My first completed book of 2017! Vivian Gornick, where have you and your clear, perfect prose about living and growing older and cities and friendship and great books and all the important shit ever been my whole life?
Friends, you must read this. Immediately. Go on. Now. I'll be here impatiently playing with a yo-yo and buying everything Ms. Gornick has ever set down on paper.
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
A lot of her reflections are mini-monographs, like counts …
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn’t know (me) to a man I also didn’t know (the figure on the wedding cake).
There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule. I used to think this distinction more a matter of one-on-one relationships than I now do. These days I look upon it more as a matter of temperament. That is, there are people who are temperamentally inclined to be enlivened, and others for whom it is work. Those who are inclined are eager to feel expressive; those for whom it’s work are more receptive to melancholia. New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. The pavements are filled with those longing to escape the prison sentence of the one into the promise of the other. There are times when the city seems to reel beneath its impact.
“Every man alone is sincere,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins … A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature.”
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
A lot of her reflections are mini-monographs, like counts …
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. I’d not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didn’t know (me) to a man I also didn’t know (the figure on the wedding cake).
There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule. I used to think this distinction more a matter of one-on-one relationships than I now do. These days I look upon it more as a matter of temperament. That is, there are people who are temperamentally inclined to be enlivened, and others for whom it is work. Those who are inclined are eager to feel expressive; those for whom it’s work are more receptive to melancholia. New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. The pavements are filled with those longing to escape the prison sentence of the one into the promise of the other. There are times when the city seems to reel beneath its impact.
“Every man alone is sincere,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins … A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature.”
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. Iâd not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
A lot of her reflections are mini-monographs, like counts …
This is a quite short and sweet autobiography, based on thoughts, not on chronology, which serves the author right. Her quite recent interview in The Paris Review serves this book well.
Gornick's style is terse and straightforward, which often serves her diary-ish entries well:
As the orchestra tuned up and the lights dimmed in the soft, starry night, I could feel the whole intelligent audience moving forward as one, yearning toward the music, toward themselves in the music: as though the concert were an open-air extension of the context of their lives. And I, just as intelligently I hoped, leaned forward, too, but I knew that I was only mimicking the movement. Iâd not yet earned the right to love the music as they did. Within a few years I began to see it was entirely possible that I never would.
Before I was thirty-five I had been as much bedded as any of my friends, and I had also been twice married, twice divorced. Each marriage lasted two and a half years, and each was undertaken by a woman I didnât know (me) to a man I also didnât know (the figure on the wedding cake).
There are two categories of friendship: those in which people enliven one another and those in which people must be enlivened to be with one another. In the first category one clears the decks to be together; in the second one looks for an empty space in the schedule. I used to think this distinction more a matter of one-on-one relationships than I now do. These days I look upon it more as a matter of temperament. That is, there are people who are temperamentally inclined to be enlivened, and others for whom it is work. Those who are inclined are eager to feel expressive; those for whom itâs work are more receptive to melancholia. New York friendships are an education in the struggle between devotion to the melancholy and attraction to the expressive. The pavements are filled with those longing to escape the prison sentence of the one into the promise of the other. There are times when the city seems to reel beneath its impact.
âEvery man alone is sincere,â said Ralph Waldo Emerson. âAt the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins ⦠A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature.â
