The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.30 (815 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0375400958 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-01-27 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
a provocative book about love and life Allan Brain This autobiographical "study" of erotic desire and family dynamics is very entertaining and its focus on classical mythology is stimulating, but ultimately a little disappointing.The author is a classics scholar, and perhaps it is too much to expect him to address more than a handful of Greek literary or mythic works. But when reading his careful and perceptive analyses of myths such as Narcissus, plays such as Sophocles' Oedipus and Antigone, Euripides' Hippolytus and Ion. Siding with the Sliding Signifiers One of the very finest writers on cultures from ancient Greece to modern America writing today.. Welcome Daniel Mendelsohn! Grady Harp "The Elusive Embrace" is a promising first novel that hopefully heralds a new standard of writing that will open the 21st Century. Daniel Mendelsohn is an able storyteller, a writer's writer, and has the ingenuity and good graces to pull us up to a new level of intellectual investigation. That this is a first novel is a staggering fact that bodes well for us as we slip out of 1999 and enter a new millennium.Mendelsohn has written an engrossing journal of discovery of his i
The Elusive Embrace is an elegantly written memoir that shifts effortlessly between these locales, and between the events in Mendelsohn's life and the Greek and Roman classics that are his academic specialty. It would be a place where somehow the outside reality of the world that met your eyes and ears could finally be made to match the inner, hidden reality of what you knew yourself to be." And while he's found that place in Manhattan's Chelsea district, Mendelsohn has only one foot there--his other foot is in suburban New Jersey, where he acts as a masculine role model ("not exactly a fa
A provocative, profoundly moving literary debut--part personal history, part cultural commentary--that announces a writer of dazzling originality.In an emotionally charged narrative that weaves together past and present, the personal and the scholarly, a young critic and classicist takes us on a search for the meaning of identity--while showing, through remarkably fresh and accessible readings of such classical Greek and Roman writers as Catullus and Sappho, Ovid and Sophocles, how ancient stories continue to hold truths for us today.The landscapes through which Daniel Mendelsohn takes us: the deceptively quiet streets of the suburb where he grew up, torn between his mathematician father, who sought after scientific truth, and his Orthodox Jewish grandfather, who told "beautiful lies"; the Southern university, steeped in history and secret traditions, where he first experienced seductions both sexual and intellectual; Internet chat rooms and the streets of Chelsea, Manhattan's newest gay ghetto, where "desire for love" competes with "love of desire"; the quiet, moonlit house where a close friend's small son teaches him the meaning of fatherhood.And, in a narrative tour de force that marks the book's conclusion, Mendelsohn's themes--desire and sexuality, the hidden meanings of classical and Hebrew writings, the restless search for cultural and perso