The Elusive Embrace
Desire and the Riddle of Identity
(Sprache: Englisch)
Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embrace is a...
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Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embrace is a profound exploration of the mysteries of identity. It is also a meditation in which the author uses his own divided life to investigate the "rich conflictedness of things," the double lives all of us lead.Daniel Mendelsohn recalls the deceptively quiet suburb where he grew up, torn between his mathematician father's pursuit of scientific truth and the exquisite lies spun by his Orthodox Jewish grandfather; the streets of manhattan's newest "gay ghetto," where "desire for love" competes with "love of desire;" and the quiet moonlit house where a close friend's small son teaches him the meaning of fatherhood. And, finally, in a neglected Jewish cemetery, the author uncovers a family secret that reveals the universal need for storytelling, for inventing myths of the self. The book that Hilton Als calls "equal to Whitman's 'Song of Myself,'" The Elusive Embrace marks a dazzling literary debut.
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From Chapter OneFor a long time I have lived in two places.
One of these places is a quiet street lined with houses whose windows peer out from between wooden shutters at trees and the occasional car, a street in many ways like the nondescript one where I grew up, seething and afraid. When I am in that place, I live in one of those narrow squinting houses with a woman and a small child. I will come to that later.
The other place where I live is in New York City, slightly to the north of gay culture.
Half a block west of my front door lies Eighth Avenue, a one-way, four-lane, north-south artery that carries traffic uptown--that is, north. Eighth Avenue begins far downtown as the much smaller Hudson Street, still paved in places with cobblestones and endlessly subject to obscure and ongoing repairs; down there, it takes you past tiny cross-streets whose numberless names betray their great age, since once you get above the Village, above Fourteenth Street, the later, modern, rigid grid on which Manhattan is laid out supersedes the haphazard and twisted and ancient streets to the south. The grid is, for the most part, easy: its longitudinal lines are all called avenues, their numbers increasing as you go from east to west (with a few famous exceptions, like Park and Madison), and its latitudinal lines are streets, whose numbers escalate as you go from south to north. Attempts are occasionally made to impose names on these numbers--we are supposed to call Sixth Avenue "the Avenue of the Americas," for instance, and someone has rechristened a snippet of West Sixty-fifth Street near Lincoln Center "Leonard Bernstein Way"--but New Yorkers, always pressed for time, enjoy the brisk and unromantic efficiency of the numbers and ignore the names. In many ways we are a city of people who prefer numbers to
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names.
As Hudson Street arcs its way up through the West Village, which until recently was the center of New York gay life, it shakes off its curves and widens, becoming Eighth Avenue just below Fourteenth Street, which is the east-west thoroughfare that marks the southern boundary of the neighborhood called Chelsea, the current center of New York gay life. Fourteenth Street divides the Village from Chelsea. Most of the streets in Greenwich Village have names; all of the streets in Chelsea are numbered.
If you walk the half-block from my door to Eighth Avenue and make a right turn into it here, in the mid-Twenties, following the traffic north, it'll take you first past some nondescript lofts and tenements and, at Twenty-seventh Street, the Fashion Institute of Technology, which is known generally by its acronym, F.I.T., or, more locally, as "Fags In Training"; then it heads past the big train station at Thirty-fourth Street and the bus station at Forty-second. The avenue continues up through the glittering clutter of Times Square and, after dissolving briefly into the incoherent rapids of Columbus Circle, reemerges rather grandly as Central Park West. Lined by stout matronly prewar buildings on one side and the park on the other, Central Park West neatly divides Culture from Nature for the perusal of those well heeled enough to appreciate the view. It continues with bourgeois rectitude straight up along the park into the West Seventies and Eighties and Nineties--addresses that, at least until the rise of Chelsea as the city's premier gay neighborhood, were favored by a lot of gay men, but are now more likely to be associated, at least by the emigres here in my neighborhood, with yuppies, strollers, and, vaguely, heterosexuality.
But of course I rarely turn right at the end o
As Hudson Street arcs its way up through the West Village, which until recently was the center of New York gay life, it shakes off its curves and widens, becoming Eighth Avenue just below Fourteenth Street, which is the east-west thoroughfare that marks the southern boundary of the neighborhood called Chelsea, the current center of New York gay life. Fourteenth Street divides the Village from Chelsea. Most of the streets in Greenwich Village have names; all of the streets in Chelsea are numbered.
If you walk the half-block from my door to Eighth Avenue and make a right turn into it here, in the mid-Twenties, following the traffic north, it'll take you first past some nondescript lofts and tenements and, at Twenty-seventh Street, the Fashion Institute of Technology, which is known generally by its acronym, F.I.T., or, more locally, as "Fags In Training"; then it heads past the big train station at Thirty-fourth Street and the bus station at Forty-second. The avenue continues up through the glittering clutter of Times Square and, after dissolving briefly into the incoherent rapids of Columbus Circle, reemerges rather grandly as Central Park West. Lined by stout matronly prewar buildings on one side and the park on the other, Central Park West neatly divides Culture from Nature for the perusal of those well heeled enough to appreciate the view. It continues with bourgeois rectitude straight up along the park into the West Seventies and Eighties and Nineties--addresses that, at least until the rise of Chelsea as the city's premier gay neighborhood, were favored by a lot of gay men, but are now more likely to be associated, at least by the emigres here in my neighborhood, with yuppies, strollers, and, vaguely, heterosexuality.
But of course I rarely turn right at the end o
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Autoren-Porträt von Daniel Mendelsohn
DANIEL MENDELSOHN is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is the Editor at Large. His books include the international best seller The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and many other honors; a memoir, The Elusive Embrace, a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year; a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of C. P. Cavafy; and two collections of essays, How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken and Waiting for the Barbarians. A professor of Humanities at Bard College, he is Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Daniel Mendelsohn
- 2000, 224 Seiten, Maße: 13,2 x 20,3 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: VINTAGE
- ISBN-10: 0375706976
- ISBN-13: 9780375706974
- Erscheinungsdatum: 01.03.2022
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"A one-of-a-kind book-wise, startling, and wonderfully unclassifiable." -Newsweek"A literary achievement of the first rank.... The Greeks knew how to give a universal significance to individual experience. So does Daniel Mendelsohn." -The New York Observer
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