Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
By one of the world's foremost literary critics, George Steiner's My Unwritten Books meditates upon seven books he had long had in mind to write, but never did. Massively erudite, the essays are also brave, unflinching, and wholly personal.
In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of seven books which he did not write. Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenge proved beyond his capacities.
The actual themes range widely and defy conventional taboos: the torment of the gifted when they live among—when they confront—the very great; the experience of sex in different languages; a love for animals greater than for human beings; the costly privilege of exile; a theology of emptiness.
Yet a unifying perception underlies this diversity. The best we have or can produce is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every good book, as in a lit shadow, lies the book which remained unwritten, the one that would have failed better.
The Barnes & Noble Review
One of the last grand European men (or women) of letters, George Steiner seems positively out of historical time. He writes with the dandy flair of an 18th-century stylist and with the inflection of personal experience, Montaigne-like, without descending into the confessional (which he loathes). Each of these seven essays lays out a feline argument for a particular book that Steiner ultimately decided not to take on. His apologies for book-length studies of the quixotic sinologist Joseph Needham and the forgotten Cecco d'Ascoli -- a vanquished rival of Dante -- are moving historical essays-cum-exercises in self-critique. Elsewhere, Steiner turns to his two great themes, language and Judaism, to explore the relation of language and sexuality ("The Tongues of Eros" gives new meaning to the phrase oral sex), his vexed relationship to Zionism, his proposals for a new sense of literacy that acknowledges the archaisms of the classical education he received, and his admittedly irrational attachment to dogs. In "Begging the Question," the last essay in the collection, Steiner notes the paradox of dwelling in the personal -- treasuring private and solitary moments of writing, reading, and thinking -- and the necessary self-betrayal of publication. "The adult believer seeks to be alone with his God. As I strive to be with His sovereign absence. Already I have said, I have failed to say, too much." --Eric Banks