Quarrel & Quandary: Essays

Quarrel and Quandary, a collection of essays, is the first book by Cynthia Ozick that I’ve read, and I finished it feeling impressed. Perhaps what stands out most strongly to me is her serious, firm, no-nonsense, occasionally devastating argumentation style. I would not ever want to be the subject of Ozick’s critique; she can be frighteningly effective when goes on the attack.

The essays cover a range of material. Many of them are literary in nature, including essays on Kafka, Dostoevsky, Sebald, Henry James, and others. Other essays explore broader literary phenomena such as the various adaptations of The Diary of Anne Frank and the treatment of the Holocaust in fiction. These last two are good examples of what I mean by her show more devastating argumentation style; she is angry at theatrical adaptations of the diary that downplay the horror of Anne’s fate in order to focus on the diary’s hopeful messages. In the essay on Holocaust fiction, she critiques Sophie’s Choice and Bernard Schlink’s The Reader for covering over some of the worst aspects of Holocaust history by focusing on exceptions and rare cases in the stories they tell. That essay (which you can read here) is a nuanced discussion of the tension between the right of authors to write about whatever they want and their responsibility to be ethical human beings.

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Ozick really succeeds at crafting essays of literary criticisms that are explorations of a subject and content. Whether it's Dostoevsky and criminality or appropriation of Anne Frank she has a keen wit and insight. I'd almost go as far to say firebrand. I also thought her meditation on the book of Job and poetry were alone well worth the cost of the book. I can't say I was as enthralled with her personal essays toward the end of the collection but overall this is a great set of essays in the classic tradition of the form.

Very dry, but very insightful.

My faves from this book: Dostoevsky's Unabomber, A Drug Store Eden, The Synthetic Sublime, The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination, Who Owns Anne Frank?, and Public Intellectuals.