Quarrel & Quandary
Read Quarrel & Quandary Online
Authors: Cynthia Ozick
CYNTHIA OZICK
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“A must-read.… [Ozick’s] prose is playful and tart, free in its gusto and flawless in its power and economy. The critic and polemicist take a back seat to the reveler in memory, and the delightful results need not be analyzed, only savored.”
—The Seattle Times
“A volume of essays by Cynthia Ozick is always cause for celebration.… [Ozick] is the one contemporary practitioner of the essay form who harmoniously blends what the essayist Thomas De Quincey called ‘the literature of knowledge’ with the literature of power.… Her bold formulations come to us with epigrammatic force and measured cadences that are music to the inward ear.”
—
Jerusalem Post
“I urge all lovers of American prose to read it.… [Ozick’s] pieces have genuine durability. They are great essays.”
—John Sutherland,
The New York Times Book Review
“A welcome relief from the onslaught of mass popular culture.… Tightly reasoned and closely argued.… Ozick writes about ideas, and about abstract concepts, without bothering to dumb them down. She is an intellectual.… She writes as an unabashedly educated person, bringing her erudition to bear on analyses of Kafka and Dostoyevsky, the Book of Job and the diary of Anne Frank, the writing process and the workings of memory.”
—The Oregonian
“The nineteen essays in
Quarrel & Quandary
give ample evidence that [Ozick] is as engaged with cultural politics as she ever was—and, moreover, that her skills as a take-no-prisoners polemicist can still give her antagonists fits. Ozick, in short, writes provocative essays that sharpen the debate about what culture means, or should mean, at the beginning of our new century.”
—The Miami Herald
“Ozick’s prose is at its symphonic best, and her eye for detail is thrilling.… [Her] breadth of reference, her wit, incisiveness and classic prose … turn every page into a literary feast.… A delicious, passionate, and thoroughly
engagé
book.”
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“Lively.… A champ of American letters, the erudite Ozick writes sentences that snap with the brisk rhythms of her thoughts.… This collection offers [essays] that stir, unnerve, and challenge in ways both political and artistic.”
—The Boston Phoenix
“Ozick here is doing what she does best, and, frankly, doing what very few writers do anymore: treating literature as criticism of life, and making literature of critical writing.… She tugs and pushes at our language, defending its precision, vitality, and nuance.… An Ozick essay is resounding, distinctive, pungent.… The importance of literature, intelligence, reflection, opinion, and expression is never at question in Ozick’s domain—nor is her sense of obligation to them.… She demonstrates how the imagination in the service of language, pluck, and chance delivers art.”
—Bookforum
“[Ozick is] one of America’s foremost intellectuals.… The essays in her new collection,
Quarrel & Quandary
, justify her reputation for originality and brilliance.”
—The Plain Dealer
“In nineteen exquisitely wrought pieces, [Ozick] guides readers on an intellectual journey.… Like her beloved literary ‘Master,’ Henry James … Ozick’s luminous if sometimes prickly prose delights, even as it confronts and contends.… In this engaging collection … illuminations abound.”
—The Record
(Bergen County, NJ)
“A series of eloquent meditations.… [Ozick’s] delicately modulated prose can surprise with its deft description and evocation, as well as its power to concisely hit the mark, sometimes devastatingly, without cliche or triteness.”
—The Advocate
(Stamford, CT)
“Ozick is an intellectual warrior and a mighty essayist. In her fourth collection, the fiercest yet, she grasps the texts that claim her attention, turns them upside down, and shakes them for all she’s worth until they’re emptied of their secrets.… [A] potent and necessary volume.”
—Booklist
CYNTHIA OZICKQ
uarrel &
Q
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Cynthia Ozick’s essays, novels, and short stories have won numerous prizes and awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters Strauss Living Award, four O. Henry First Prizes, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has been translated into most major languages. She and her husband live in Westchester County, New York.
Trust
The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories
Bloodshed and Three Novellas
Levitation: Five Fictions
Art & Ardor: Essays
The Cannibal Galaxy
The Messiah of Stockholm
Metaphor & Memory: Essays
The Shawl
Fame & Folly: Essays
The Puttermesser Papers
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 2001
Copyright
©
2000 by Cynthia Ozick
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The essays in this collection originally appeared, in whole or in part, in the following publications:
American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Borders, Commentary, Expressen
(Stockholm),
House & Garden, Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker
, and
The Yale Review
.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Random House, Inc.:
Four lines from “The More Loving One” from
W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
by W. H. Auden. Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith, and Monroe K. Spears, Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
Charles Wright:
Eight lines from poem by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Ozick, Cynthia.
Quarrel & quandary : essays / Cynthia Ozick.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80788-5
1. Literature—History and criticism. I. Title: Quarrel & quandary. II. Title.
PN511 .O95 2000
814′.54—dc21 99-089889
Author photograph
©
Julius Ozick
v3.1
To
Martin Baron
Forethoughts
We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
—W.B. Yeats
“But you
are
engagé,” the famous and energetic man who four years ago directed my play remarked the other day. I say “my play,” and not “a play of mine,” which may suggest more than one, because it is the only work for the theater I have ever written; I feel certain I will never write another. I had not seen the director since the play closed, and his comment—that once-faddish, Sartre-sounding word—startled me. My one play had, in fact, been political, even polemical; it was about Holocaust denial. And though I had always longed to try my hand at drama, I had supposed it would find its shape, if the time ever came, in something literary or satiric, or both; my secret mnemonic model was Simon Gray’s frivolously melancholic
The Common Pursuit
, which had, decades ago, enthralled me. So I was surprised when a congeries of circumstances, not all of my own manufacture, resulted in a play that was indisputably “engagé.” I had been driven to it like a wheel the spokes of which were being nailed into place, even while it ran, by mechanics in unfamiliar uniform.