In his book On Late Style, published posthumously in 2006, the Palestinian American critic Edward Said identifies a striking characteristic of some writers as they near the end of their lives.
Rather than going gently into that good night, to borrow poet Dylan Thomas’s phrase, they exhibit instead “a renewed, almost youthful energy”. In Said’s account, the work of these aged writers communicates not “harmony and resolution”, but, rather, a sense of “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction”.
