3 best Vivian Gornick books

Nothing more dangerous for the iron moral, the solid beliefs and the immobility in whatever its manifestation, than someone like Vivian gornick.

Books are powerful because they serve the most transformative critical vision. Each Vivian novel is a sociological approach (it sounds like the best but it is). Everyday scenarios where the author destroys the trompe l'oeil, that kind of existential plot that allows us to adapt to each scene of life (from the lightest to the most cruel or unjust) without hardly flinching.

Nothing better to achieve that awakening of consciences than to write with the most open exposition of biography. A testimony that ends up being a faithful chronicle of the sociological evolution in that parallel and necessary advance that is always marked by the defense of minorities and disadvantaged classes.

With her Jewish origins, Vivian knows a lot about injustice because she carries it on her skin. And so she is able to present her stories to us as overwhelming processes of mimicry and empathy. It is said that poets can only write the best sonnets from sadness, heartbreak or melancholy. In this case, a prose writer draws that authenticity from the tragic and the unfair to end up stirring up sensations in us narcotized by the easy assumption of "it is what it is", without inhabiting more skin and more navel than ours.

Once you Toni Morrison He has already left us, Vivian remains at the helm of the most socially demanding American literature.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Vivian Gornick

Fierce attachments

A timeless book. In fact it took its good decades to be published in Spain. And yet, perhaps to the greater derision of all society, as current as in the past.

Gornick, a mature woman, walks with her mother, now elderly, through the streets of Manhattan, and during those walks full of reproaches, memories and complicities, she reels the story of a daughter's struggle to find her own place in the world. From very early on, Gornick is influenced by two very different female role models: one, her mother's; the other, Nettie's. Both of them, leading figures in the world full of women that is their environment, represent models that the young Gornick yearns and hates to embody, and who will determine her relationship with men, work and other women for the rest of her life.

Fierce attachments

Look straight ahead

Facing someone with whom we have a lot in common, be it time, love, children, friendship ... but not only that, but also looking directly in the mirror, at that figure on the other side that sometimes, if we stop in front of it, can raise doubts buried between the rush and the necessary oblivion.

Only in Vivian's case, everything acquires greater value, even whether looking at others or ourselves in that mirror that we usually pay little attention to beyond appearance. Because doubts, the deepest inquisitions link with injustices, the stereotypes that arouse fears ... In Looking straight ahead, Gornick turns the memory of her experience as a waitress in the Castkills not only into a bittersweet approach to youthful desire and summer jobs , but in an indelible contact with class and gender inequalities.

Her journey as a visiting professor at various American universities helps her draw a wonderful and tragicomic X-ray of the academic landscape as a torture for the spirit: isolated communities, with their rites and quarrels, with their peculiar dynamics of solitude and sociability where the soul grows moldy surrounded of beings only apparently related. In these irresistible vignettes, Gornick once again offers us the singular gaze - brave and fierce, empathetic and always straight ahead - with which he faces the world.

Look straight ahead

The singular woman and the city

At this point I'm not going to discover the author's natural scenographic love for Manhattan. It is curious how this city is capable of setting itself up as a setting for all kinds of novel or film approaches.

Woddy allen He has already immortalized that New York side of human relations amid the alienating appearance of the Big Apple. Vivian also fulfills that immortalization of the city made the protagonist. A natural continuation of "Fierce Attachments", "The Singular Woman and the City" is a fascinating and emotional map of the rhythms, fortuitous encounters and ever-changing friendships that they make up life in the city, in this case New York.

While strolling through the streets of Manhattan, again in the company of his mother or alone, Gornick observes what is happening around him, interacts with strangers, intersperses personal anecdotes and reflective pieces on friendship, on the often irrepressible attraction to loneliness and what it means to be a modern feminist. These memories are the self-portrait of a woman who fiercely defends her independence, and who has decided to live her conflicts instead of her fantasies to the end.

The singular woman and the city
5/5 - (12 votes)

5 comments on "3 best Vivian Gornick books"

  1. Being in a reading group, a bit by force, since I do not read regularly, Gornick's fierce attachments fell into my hands. Fabulous! captured me!

    Reply

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