From an essay about writers and immortality, in the New York Times:
[I]n a new novel, “The Imperfectionists,” by Tom Rachman, … one of his characters, an obituary writer, interviews an aging feminist intellectual, Gerda Erzberger, who is dying of cancer. In a room that “smells of strong tobacco and of hospital,” she tells him that the greatest force in the universe is ambition.
“Even from earliest childhood it dominated me,” she said. “I longed for achievements, to be influential — that, in particular. To sway people. This has been my religion: the belief that I deserve attention, that they are wrong not to listen, that those who dispute me are fools.”
August 14th, 2010 at 8:52PM
Sounds very interesting. Are you going to read it before school starts?
Let us know.