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.
When Daniel Mendelsohn was growing up, he "secretly imagined a place where all the people were other boys, and where all the stores and books and songs and movies and restaurants were by boys, about other boys. 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 father but a man who would be present") to the young son of a close friend. 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. Whether he's elaborating upon his earliest explorations of his sexuality or teasing out the secrets that redefine his family history, he writes with admirable grace and delicacy. --Ron Hogan--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Weaving philosophical musings and discussions of Greek myths and drama with his personal experiences, Mendelsohn explores issues of identity, sexuality, fatherhood, family and history in five essays that amount to an idiosyncratic memoir. A lecturer in classics at Princeton whose literary criticism has appeared in the New Yorker and Out, he aims to understand the apparent contradictions of his life as a single gay man and a father figure to a friend's son, and as a critic and consumer of gay culture who lives amidst yet apart from his Jewish immigrant family's heterosexuality. Despite his ambition, however, Mendelsohn doesn't entirely hit his mark. The book is flawed by a style that aims to be elegantly elaborateAone sentence is 404 words longAbut comes across as pretentious (as when he employs "necropolis" instead of "cemetery" for little reason). His use of Greek myths is neither original nor insightful; a three-page sketch of the story of Antigone feels like filler. More problematic, however, is Mendelsohn's tendency not simply to generalize but to universalize from his own experience. He makes such dubious claims as this: "when men have sex with a woman they fall 'into' the woman... gay men fall through their partners back into themselves." He also frequently speaks unreflectively of all gay men as a single group, undercutting his credibility as a social observer and critic. In the end, his intense focus on the primacy of his experience and the lack of social and historical context diminishes the resonance his own experience might have for others. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Daniel Mendelsohn was born on Long Island in 1960 and was educated at the University of Virginia and at Princeton, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. After completing his Ph.D. in Classics in 1994, he began a career in journalism in New York City, and since then his articles, essays, reviews and translations have appeared frequently in numerous national publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, Newsweek, The New York Review of Books, and Travel + Leisure, where he is a contributing editor. From 2000 until 2002, he was the weekly book critic for New York magazine, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Criticism. Mr. Mendelsohn's other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George Jean Nathan Prize for Dramatic Criticism.
His first book, "The Elusive Embrace," published by Knopf in 1999, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. In 2002, he published a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, "Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays." In 2006 Mr. Mendelsohn's international bestseller "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," was published in the United States to extraordinary critical acclaim. A New York Times Notable Book of 2006 and a 'Best of the Year' pick in a dozen other newspapers, The Lost won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Salon Book Award, and a number of other honors; in its foreign translations it has been awarded the Prix Médicis (France), the ADEI-WIZO Prize (Italy) and was short-listed for the Duff Cooper Prize (UK). With now over half a million copies in print, it has been translated into a dozen other languages for publication throughout Europe and in Israel.
In August, 2008 a collection of Mr. Mendelsohn's critical essays about books, theater, and film, entitled "How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken," most of them from the New York Review of Books, was published by HarperCollins, and was subsequently named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008. In April 2009, his two-volume translation, with commentary, of the complete works of Constantine Cavafy, including the first-ever translation of the poet's "Unfinished Poems", was published by Alfred A. Knopf and immediately hailed as "extraordinary" (The New Yorker), "the definitive Cavafy for some time to come" (Publishers Weekly), and "a work of art in its own right" (The New York Times Book Review). He currently working on a new book, "Odysseys: Adventures in Reading the Greeks," to be published in 2012.
Mr. Mendelsohn divides his time between homes in New York City and in New Jersey, where his family live.
This review is from: The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Paperback)
The Elusive Embrace was well written but was it worth it? This is a memory piece by a fortyish gay male who interweaves his Jewish family's history, his sexual life in New York's Chelsea district, his reminiscences of sexual coming-of-age as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia (the least graphic, and probably the most beautiful and evocative prose), and Greek mythology, at which, as a classics prof, he is expert (useful, but pedantic).
Having achieved a sort of stellar lifestyle compromise--lectureship at Princeton, sexual freedom in Manhattan, and a close relationship mentoring a baby to whom he is almost but not quite a father figure--we wonder why Mendelsohn felt compelled to write about it.
As the song goes, the author is "his own special creation." I guess all gay men are. I have a feeling, though, that Mendelsohn's life story was highly edited to make it more acceptable to a gay readership. We don't hear about what it's like teaching at an Ivy League school, and only passing reference is made to the author's heterosexual experience, or to his life as a graduate student. His life emerges as a coherent work with an awful lot of thimble-rigging, string-pulling and myth-quoting--more than would have been necessary in a more straightforward account. I agree with the earlier reviewer who said the author bit off more than he could chew. Beautifully written, but not too satisfying.
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Although the premises of Mendelsohn's fragmentary and redundant essays are always compelling, the style of this book is like reading through a haze of canvas. Some of the ideas explored involve the bipolarity of identity itself (people are and are not what they project synchronistically, partly because they cannot 'see' themselves in action -- only through interpretation); the identity of masculinity is and is not synchronistically a projection of ourselves and what we perceive as ideal masculinity (narcissism); Greek and Latin texts give us a clearer insight than any contemporary psychological treastise; fatherhood -- what males can produce and how the father was produced -- is the ultimate laboratory for masculinity. Mendelsohn's book is swamped in subjective assumptions and perceptions, which asks the reader to accept quite a lot from a total stranger. Also, Mendelsohn's love life is truly too boring and mundane as a foundation for much of anything, let alone the eye-opening discoveries that he wishes us to accept ("And then I went home with another beautiful young man...."). Written in a style that would put Henry James or Marcel Proust to sleep, the book would have made a far better essay for 'The Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review,' rather than 200 pages of theory.
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This review is from: The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Paperback)
At first I was intimidated by the customer reviews that made mention of the author's use of classical references as I am not classically educated and often find such references pretentious. However, I am happy to report that Mr. Mendelsohn's work is compelling and always easy to follow.
"The Elusive Emrace" is equal parts memoir and essay, filled with keen observations and poignant scenes from his life. I was especially moved by those involving his god son Nicholas, and the final sections dealing with ancient family secrets and myths. His prose is beautiful, and his ideas about the duplicity of identity, how we are all many things at once, are succinctly articulated.
I highly recommend this book, though I do have one caveat. On page 82 (of the paperback) the author notes that all the happy gay couples he knows have sex outside of their relationsips. He follows this observation with the gross generalization: "This is a fact of gay life." It may be a fact for some gay couples, but certainly not all. It sounds like the author is trying to justify his own suspect promiscuity by proclaiming it to be the norm. I would advise hime to reference his own comments from page 38: "Knowledge may make you aware that the certainties of others are often more convenient than true, allowing those who hold them to live a coherent and sensible life, allowing their choices and their ideologies to make a kind of sense."
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