The Passion Of New Eve (Virago Modern Classics)

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The author] exacts a ... surrender from the reader. There is some exceptionally strenuous image activity ahead in these stories that precisely reactivate the magnificent gesticulations of giant forms, the bewildering transformations, the orgiastic violence that hurts nobody because it is not real - all the devices of dream, or film, or fiction. Evelyn (Eve) is the main character of the novel; moreover, he is a complex and versatile person, as he cannot decide what he wants from his life. At first, one can see that he lives only for his lust and is extremely a selfish person. The primary negative trait of the character is that he doesn’t appreciate anything what he has; he has no values at all and no respect for others. In the end of the novel he changes his gender, but doesn’t find himself even in a woman’s body. Baroslav I didn't particularly enjoy reading this book. I found it to be distastefully pornographic, violent, and, to the degree that colour matters to the protagonist, racist. Flesh and the Mirror” is narrated by an English woman, who recalls a day-and-a-half period in which she wanders the streets of Tokyo, weeping, searching for her lover. She turns herself into a character in a melodrama, she later realizes, living her life as a performance, relishing her anguish and hysteria. She observes her own life from outside, as if it were taking place on stage. She has always lived as if she were a actor in a romantic play and now she eagerly throws herself into the age-old role of abandoned lover, loving the opportunity to indulge in self-dramatization.

Okay, so yes. This in an interesting book. A bizarre, hallucinatory, interesting book that explores sex and gender and mythology. And...Simone de Beauvoir calls women the ‘second sex’, and by this, she means that the man is considered to be the standard, whereas the woman is defined in relation to the man. In Passion of New Eve, Evelyn becomes a woman; he was originally a man. Therefore Eve’s identity as a woman is defined as by no longer being the man she was as Evelyn. Her new identity is in relation to who she was as a man, and only in relation to this. Gender is constructed in relation to a phallogocentric societal authority that we, in general, accept as the norm. We folded ourselves within a single self in the desert…We now projected upon each other’s flesh, selves – aspects of being, ideas – that seemed, during our embraces, to be the very essence of our selves; the concentrated essence of being, as if, out of these fathomless kisses and our interpenetrating, undifferentiated sex, we had made the great Platonic hermaphrodite together, the whole and perfect being to which he, with an absurd and touching heroism, had, in his own single self, aspired; we brought into being the being who stops time in the self-created eternity of lovers." For instance I wonder what to make of the fact that Evelyn lost his desire for Leilah when she became pregnant, and that when Eve became pregnant, the copious sex forced on her vanishes - she is captured by children, religious children, old enough to be sexual, but who want only her mothering. And what to make of the fact that when the movie star transsexual is forced to penetrate Eve he falls in love with her - becoming, I suppose, the man he never was, by sleeping with a woman who is in fact a man? Well, it's all a mystery to me. Wow - her writing is pyrotechnic - it says on the cover - and its a bloody good way of describing it! Her name itself whispered rumours of inexpressible sadness; the lingering sibilants rustled like the doomed petticoats of a young girl who is dying."

Apro, dunque, il mio nuovo anno di letture con questo fil rouge che mi lascia sul sentiero femminile/femminista. O, perlomeno, io mi ero illusa di aver teso un filo d’unione. Baroslav is a friend of Evelyn. He is a Czech neighbor, an alchemist – but it’s all information about his life, because it was comparatively short. His role in the novel isn’t long because he was killed by a group of young people, shortly after acquaintance with the main character of this novel. Leilah (Lilith) So yes. A man gets kidnapped on his way across an America which is about to decay into civil war by a group of women who turn him into a woman. Then... forget it, you'll just have to read it. This leaves the question as to whether Eve can “become” a woman (in the sense meant by de Beauvoir). I found it impossible to discuss the themes of the novel that interested me, without revealing two aspects of the plot.You were an illusion in a void. You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my own emptiness with marvelous, imaginary things as long as, just so long as, the movie lasted, and then all would vanish… [You yourself would live only] as long as ‘persistence of vision’." Still, Evelyn learns something about himself, and what it was that really attracted him about his lover: