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1:15 PM – Saturday – Book Club
February 15, 2020 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
What: The Unpunished Vice
By: Edmund White
Host: Rick
Where: Quatrefoil Library
When: Feb 15 at 1:15 PM
Contact Rick for details or to subscribe to book club notices by email here.
Book Review:
Edmund White, …the author of “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Farewell Symphony,” is back with a new book-crazy memoir, “The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading.” It finds him seductively “rambling” (his word) through his boyhood memories of library-stack escapades, both bibliophilic and erotic; his literary friendships with John Irving, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje and others; and his marriage to writer Michael Carroll, which he makes sound like a union between a social butterfly (himself) and an extremely fit but soberly devoted apostle of literature (Carroll). There’s also brilliant commentary on novelists Colette and Penelope Fitzgerald, cult author Curzio Malaparte, playwright-filmmaker Jean Cocteau and Britain’s greatest literary eccentric, Henry Green, whom White discovered at the Evanston Public Library.
The teenaged White lived with his divorced mother on Chicago’s Near North Side before heading to college in Michigan. As he puts it, he was “a midwestern public library aesthete and would-be intellectual” who hankered after Paris — and eventually got there too.
Michael Upchurch, Chicago Tribune
