Vivian Gornick first became known to French-speaking readers last year with Fierce attachment, solid story of a mother-daughter relationship rich in neuroses. In The woman apart, we find the same tone, where the suffering produced by the consciousness of the social environment emerges, and the same main character – the double of the narrator, New York, her city. And it is this muse, or rather one of her boroughs, the much-desired Manhattan for the native of the Bronx, who inspires her throughout these pages.
“My city,” she writes, “is rather that of the melancholy English: Dickens and Johnson, especially Johnson. The city was for him the way out of its slums. The street pulled him out of a gloomy loneliness to connect him to humanity. In the streets, Johnson drew his wisdom. “
This island of Manhattan, which she dreams of conquering since childhood, and the noble figure of Dr Johnson, the lion of English literature of the 18th century, are perhaps the counter-poison to this terrible social conscience which makes her a feminist. and a Communist sympathizer (those words still mean something, no matter what). Born in the Bronx, in a family of Jewish immigrant proletarians, Manhattan frees her much more than her “shrink”, and in its streets and avenues and parks, she finds her freedom, like the very Christian Johnson who, there is two centuries, had for only universal homeland and the so singular London.
Taboo love of freedmen
Leonard, the homosexual friend, offers him the perfect distance and the necessary connivance in which two “apart” beings recognize each other. But there is something else that saves Vivian Gornick, it is love, a terrible taboo for freedmen, which redresses all beings, bankers and tramps, blacks and whites, illiterate and literate. “In fact, love meant more to me than I thought.” The Grail, she admits, was “Love with a capital A, work with a capital T.” But working with a capital T is still love. At home, this feeling extends to friends and strangers who put on the great spectacle of the city every hour of the day and night, where she sees “a few people roasting a pig in the middle of the street at midnight, because the ‘one of them had won the lottery’.
The author’s mother, archetype of the loving and guilty Jewish mother, follows her like her shadow in the streets of her city, during her walks: “My mother and I are walking on the avenue which runs alongside the city where she is resides. Cars honk, three Hispanics argue, two lesbians embrace, a drug addict drops in front of a window. We pay no attention to them, especially my mother, who tells me about her suffering. In a way, this neighborhood made her a New Yorker. But she remained the woman stubbornly revolted by the life she always was. ” Vivian Gornick, deep down, always writes “the mother’s book” and, in this refreshing book, the bubbling love of life always trumps rebellion.
Vivian Gornick, “La femme à part”, trad. from the American by Laetitia Devaux, Rivages, 160 pages
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