Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life [Paperback]

Gillian Rose (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 7, 1997

Writing with rare power and insight, one of England's most distinguished thinkers and scholars takes readers on an extraordinary journey through the soul, plumbing her own life in an attempt to illuminate the deepest issues of all human life: love, family, friendship, sexuality, illness, and death.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a memoir by turns brilliant and exasperating, Rose, who teaches philosophy in England, travels between the adjoining territories of love and death after being diagnosed with-and receiving brutal and ambiguously effective treatment for-abdominal cancer. "Keep your mind in hell, and despair not," she admonishes herself, rejecting both the uncertain certainties of traditional medicine and the sterile idealism of New Age healing. Instead, she puts her shoulder to the wheel of "love's work," getting down in the muck of mortal experience rather than straining futilely to rise above it. Along the way, Rose discusses such worldly subjects as growing up with dyslexia and divorce, finding relief from deadening school lessons in Plato and Pascal and sharing a bed with a Catholic priest. She doesn't wear her extravagant learning lightly (Greek- and German-studded passages and the constant reaching for aphorism may alarm the uninitiated), but her unusual love story rewards the labor it demands. It cuts to the quick.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Part intellectual coming-of-age tale and part spiritual memoir, Rose's (political thought, Univ. of Warwick) search for the soul takes her on a wildly dizzying ride through despair and hope, sickness and healing, love and death. With searing honesty, Rose searches for meaning during her own violent bout with abdominal cancer and after the sickness and death of several close friends. She concludes that traditional religions and alternative healing methods are inadequate for her search because they fail to plumb the depths of the human need for the restorative powers of love. In prose both torturous and exalted, Rose's memoir questions the easy love of much spirituality and argues instead that love is difficult and rewarding because it both binds and loosens us to one another and to God. An interesting, though not necessary, purchase.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Schocken (January 7, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805210784
• ISBN-13: 978-0805210781
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,383,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amor fati, March 8, 2008

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Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (Paperback)

When she was still a teenager, Gillian Rose legally changed her last name from "Stone" to her stepfather's name, "Rose." She would henceforth be a Rose. Yet, at the same time, she would also remain a Stone, regardless of the legal ritual.

For Gillian Rose, dying at a young age from a terrible cancer and trying, as the subtitle of her memoir suggests, to come to a "reckoning with life," the name change becomes a metaphor for what it means to be a human being. Life is a combination of jagged rocks which rip the flesh and weary the feet on the one hand, and the delicate aroma and beauty of roses on the other. It does no good to focus on one at the exclusion of the other. Such exclusivity is a delusion, and delusions always wind up being deflated by real life.

Love's work, for Rose, is the earnest effort to embrace life, both its stones and its roses, in all its joyful and heartbreaking complexity. To be embodied, enfleshed, and at the same time capable of emotions and reason, is to inhabit a space in which one is continuously encountering transcendent moments that quickly get bounded by limitations of existence. But this dance between the two is what makes life so interesting, so worthwhile, and it is love's work to keep in the dance. As Rose writes (p. 105), "To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and oneself, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the boundaries. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love." Growing in love-ability is wondrous, but can also bring agony. And yet, concludes Rose, it's important to embrace both. Otherwise, one "dies deadly" rather than "dying forward into the intensified agon of living" (p. 77). In all this, one is reminded of Nietzsche's amor fati: loving one's life, the painful as well as the joyful, the tragic and the comic, the horrific and the sublime, because all of it IS one's life.

Rose's style mirrors her conviction that live is a continuous interplay of stones and roses, and it can make for some difficulty at times in deciphering her meaning. Her writing is associative, one thought flowing into another, images cascading over themselves without warning. She moves effortlessly, for example, from a discussion of sanitation at Auschwitz to colostomies, from the divorce of her parents to her own dyslexia, from the AIDS that kills her friend Jim to reflections on Plato, Pascal, and Hume. But the patient reader will begin to cotton on to Rose's style. It may still remain difficult, but it will also reveal itself as exactly the right style for what she wants to say.

"Keep your mind in hell, and despair not." This is the epigram Rose chooses for her book, and it's entirely appropriate. Note that the two clauses are connected by "and," not "but." Life isn't so much about "either/or" as it is about "and." Face life for what it is, which can frequently mean that one's mind is in a hellish place of fear, pain, suffering, loneliness (as Rose came to know only too well in her final months). But despair not, because the hell is part of life and in fact accentuates life's joy when it comes. Hell without despair: this is love's work.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully poignant and honest, January 21, 1998

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This review is from: Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (Paperback)

Extremely well written and seeped in verisimilitudes, this book contains a wonderful 'manifesto' of living. Instead of hiding behind comfortable scholarship, Rose uses scholarship to dig deeper into the uglier, messier side of life. We all know how to avoid reality; this books reveals one woman's attempt at facing it squarely. This books is a courageous example of dennoch preisen. Afterwards, I was painfully aware of issues I hadn't thought about in a long time. I thoroughly recommend this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book explains the natural power of living., February 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life (Paperback)

This extraordinary book explains the powerful life of one woman in a way that impacts us all. The interconnectedness of living, learning and loving are demonstrated through the author's personal experiences which travel through europe, New York City and even Bennington, Vermont. Somehow the improbable happenings of her life find a way of relating closely to our own. I recommend this book.