Things I don't want to know

Things I Don't Want to Know

The first volume of Deborah Levy's trilogy on women's coming-of-age: On Women's Writing. Winner of the 2020 Femina Prize for Foreign Literature.
How do we face what we cannot bear, what we do not want to know? — Writing, every act of writing, is an attempt to create a better world. Levy integrates personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory to respond to George Orwell's famous essay "Why I Write" from a female perspective, discussing writing, love, and loss in this intimate, sincere, and moving account of her life. In the book, Levy strives to balance her triple identities as a woman, mother, and writer, while also recounting the real-life experiences that profoundly influenced her fiction: her childhood in South Africa, where she lost her ability to speak due to a tragedy that befell her father; her teenage years in England, where she lived with construction workers and bus drivers in cheap restaurants, gradually developing into a writer; and at the age of fifty, her marriage broke down and she spontaneously traveled to Mallorca, Spain, to reflect on her life from a foreign land.
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※ Levy’s great strength lies in the originality of her thoughts and expressions.
— Jeanette Winterson ※ A 21st century edition of A Room of One's Own. It will be widely quoted for many years to come.
—The Irish Observer
In a powerful rebuttal to Orwell, Levy uses revealing moments from her autobiography to address the motivations Orwell posited for his writing—"pure self-centeredness," "aesthetic passion," "historical impulse," and "political purpose." This is a heartfelt and compelling account of a woman's life that feminizes and personalizes Orwell's blunt judgments.
—The Observer
A writer who transforms anger and confusion at the world into soaring poetry. He always manages to feel strangely right.
—The Independent
Levy successfully weaves together historical, political, and personal threads into a nuanced account of her life and why she wrote. Her elegantly prose memoir emphasizes the courage a woman needs to express herself.
—Library Journal
Few essayists have the courage and talent to confront George Orwell head-on. Deborah Levy's response to Orwell's iconic work, Why I Write, is both a call to action for feminism and a memoir woven with moving fragments, and a guide to writing for one of literature's most intrepid rule-breakers.
——Barnes & Noble UK

2023-08-01

湖南文艺出版社

Pu Rui Culture

160

9787572611575