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the complete review - autobiographical / literary essays

My Unwritten Books

by
George Steiner

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : great idea, and covers most of the familiar Steiner-bases

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Steiner has here transformed the vaporous conceptions of his life, the vapors of what never was and never will be, from their aeriform state to a fine and ethereal substantiality. My Unwritten Books is a gathering of shades, an elegant and eloquent gathering of mind, feeling, and autumnal passion. (...) And that is the lovely irony of this unique little book. None of these unwritten books should have been written. They are better here, as they are, untamed and errant phantoms of a brilliance whose emanations no one mortal lifetime could ever accommodate in full." - Nick Tosches, Bookforum
  
  
• "Es macht (wenn es nach all den ihm in den letzten Jahren widerfahrenen Heiligsprechungen erlaubt ist, solche Kategorien einzuführen) Spaß, ihm beim Jonglieren mit Begriffen, beim miteinander in Beziehung setzen und Verknüpfen der unterschiedlichsten Gebiete zuzuschauen." - Gert Loschütz, Frankfurter Rundschau
  
  
• "Ten years on he comes across as more vulnerable still, overcome by late-flowering doubt and a crippling awareness of "the abyss at the heart of love". If he isn't exactly humble (his confessions of failure sometimes sound more like boasts), he remains his own man, and this spikily honest little book exposes more of the man than ever before." - Blake Morrison, The Guardian
  
  
• "Steiner does not always get the balance right between such painful revelation and his scholarly subtext. In exploring the "interrelations between eros and language", he recalls rather too many multilingual sexual encounters which disclose the "private parts" of speech. Elsewhere he reprises his welcome Jewish diasporism in response to the nationalism of Israel. There is the best and worst of Steiner here. But even the worst is better than most." - Bryan Cheyette, The Indepepndent
  
  
• "The themes behind Steiner's unwritten books -- language, translation, Jewishness, the Holocaust, the death of God -- reflect, not surprisingly, the major preoccupations of his career. What is perhaps more unexpected is the revelation of his own self-doubt, his admission of failure, and a strikingly appealing note, missing from much of his earlier work, of humility in the presence of his own great gifts." - Mark Bostridge, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "My Unwritten Books, seven essays on the seven books he has not written, is bravely done. After all, we are talking about failure -- but admitting it takes the kind of confidence born of success. The failures are variously explained, but they can also be thought of as crises of faith." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Whatever personal reasons he cites, however, it seems just as plausible these projects were abandoned because none of them could stand any kind of intellectual scrutiny. (...) Unfortunately, where Mr. Steiner has elsewhere exhibited linguistic subtlety, here the points he makes are crude at best (.....) Mr. Steiner's encyclopedic knowledge, on dazzling display in other work, is merely an impediment here. At times, his efforts to wow reach the level of self-caricature." - Noah Isenberg, The New York Sun
  
  
• "These essays are not imaginary CliffsNotes; they stand alone and reveal Steiner at his most complex: irascible and passionate, erudite and self-absorbed, determined to engage the most difficult cultural problems. (...) Yet Steiner’s omnivorous scholarship is too often interrupted by bursts of self-congratulation, or just congratulation (.....) If Steiner’s self-admiration is warranted, perhaps he should have left it unwritten along with these books." - Ben Marcus, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Why does he want us to read his unwritten ones ? There may be one advantage: Steiner's unwritten books are shorter (...) Occasionally, the cry vented by Steiner's text becomes a shriek. A fine essay on the academic vice of envy begins as an otiose self-accusation." - Peter Conrad, The Observer
  
  
• "My Unwritten Books is not, however, a compendium of wishful thinking. Each chapter is a thoughtful, fact-filled, lucid map of somewhere whose exploration, Steiner tells, he refuses to undertake. Mysteriously, the cartography suffices." - Alberto Manguel, The Spectator
  
  
• "Truth be told, all seven of Steiner's essays merit expansion. (...) So many books, and so many we've lost. George Steiner's splendid My Unwritten Books suggests we need a pro-life movement in the publishing world -- now." - Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
  
  
• "The suspicion that Steiner may not actually want common readers is confirmed by the prose style. Often you can only guess at his meaning. (...) Although scornful of the obscurities of poststructuralism and deconstruction, Steiner’s own writing is little better, suggesting all too vividly a world of comfortably tenured academics talking among themselves, in a language that deliberately excludes the rest of us, and effectively saying nothing anyway. (...) The most appealing and authentic passages are on his love of animals (.....) The pen portrait of his dog Ben is truly lovely, and his description of the way the mere presence of a dog gives a home a perpetual "warm hum", even when it’s asleep, is worthy of Jilly Cooper." - Christopher Hart, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Perhaps the angle of his lens is too wide for proper focus. The darting aperçu comes all too easily, as do psychologistic insinuations operating slyly in the middle ground between analysis and taking the very high moral ground. (...) The style, as Steiner says, proclaims the man: scintillating, seductive, "twopence coloured" rather than "penny plain", and not above bulldozing when the nature of the terrain gets in the way." - David Martin, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In My Unwritten Books George Steiner describes seven book-ideas that never came to fruition, for a variety of reasons. One imagines there are, in fact, many more unwritten books and proposals in the Steiner-drawers, but these seven make for a neat summa of his life and interests, a 'best of' collection, in a way, that allows Steiner to riff on many of his favourite pre-occupations but also to condense them to about thirty pages each. It makes for an interesting collection, even as it raises more questions than it answers.
       Their status as unwritten -- imaginary, if you will -- books allows Steiner more leeway than usual, and so he's in a particularly playful mood. The book is marked by questioning -- not uncertainty, mind you, but the type of scholarly calling-into-question that is meant to lead further. Indeed, he seems more concerned with that than offering answers, as if it's a relief that he doesn't have to fix in final form the definitive determination that completed books would have required. And so one repeatedly finds him apparently certain -- only to immediately turn around and open the question again:

This must be an erroneous shibboleth. But is it ?

     What is the sexual life of a deaf-mute ? To what incitements and cadence does he or she masturbate ?

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, my glorious ebony partner hummed at me: "Baby, you haven't seen anything yet."

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Links:

• New Directions publicity page
• Gallimard publicity page

• The Age
• Frankfurter Rundschau (German)
• The Guardian
• The Indepepndent
• Independent on Sunday
• The Los Angeles Times
• The National
• The New York Sun
• The Observer
• PopMatters
• The Spectator
• Svenska Dagbladet (Swedish)
• Times Higher Education

• George Steiner at the British Council
• Q & A in The Paris Review

• Errata
• Grammars of Creation
• Lessons of the Masters
• A Long Saturday
• No Passion Spent

• Simon Winchester's Joseph Needham-biography, The Man Who Loved China (also: Bomb, Book and Compass)
• See Index of Books on Books and Publishing, and Bibliographies
• See Index of Literary Essays

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About the Author:

       George Steiner, born in 1929, is one of the foremost intellectuals of our time. A professor at Cambridge and Geneva, he is the author of numerous books.

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© 2007-2017 the complete review

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