Love's Work: A Reckoning With Life - Softcover

Rose, Gillian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590173651 ISBN 13: 9781590173657

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2011

Synopsis

Love's Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and endurance of love, love that becomes real and endures through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents' divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends' tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete-to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge ("I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs," Rose writes. "My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers") and with unsettling wisdom ("To live, to love, is to be failed"), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.

About this title

Review:

Rose manages to provide a life-affirming riposte to all manner of mortal dread and confounding questions from the precipice. There are times when you lack the superlatives for truly great pieces of work, although you also find such a difficulty in classifying work as this grand, life-affirming tome, that you can expect to return to it incessantly throughout your life. (Books & That)

About the Author:

Gillian Rose (1947-1995) was a professor at the University of Warwick in England, where she taught modern European philosophy, social and political thought, and theology. Her books include Nihilism, The Broken Middle, Judaism and Modernity, and Hegel.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His works include books on Stendhal, Garcia Marquez, Nabokov, Kafka, and films. Additionally, he is a widely published essayist with articles on film and literature in Harpers, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, New Republic and others.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1590173651
• ISBN 13: 9781590173657
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176