3.5
Love's Work
ByPublisher Description
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesLove's Work Reviews
3.5
“A lovely little philosophical memoir written as Rose was dying of cancer. At its worst it veers on the tediously intellectual, and I’m not sure how good of a Marxist Rose is. But she’s a heterodox thinker, and there are moments of real lucidity and beauty in this.
The chapters on health, the body, and disease were certainly the best. I especially enjoyed her rumination - following her colostomy - on the relarionship between the self and one’s shit.
Ultimately, I think, this book is a plea to live a deep life: think deeply, love deeply. Rose urges us to see that there are rewards in the depths other than happiness. She views philosophy and love as the necessary tools to reach these depths.”
About Gillian Rose
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.
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