The Passion Of New Eve (Virago Modern Classics)

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I found it impossible to discuss the themes of the novel that interested me, without revealing two aspects of the plot. Myth, in the sense of literature or story-telling or fairy tales, can be eternal, too, not to mention circular and recurring: ”We start from our conclusions.” We end where we began. We return to our place of origin and life starts again: The novel begins with our protagonist Evelyn describing his last encounter with a woman in England, before he moved to the United States to take up an English Professor post at a New York University. He reminisces about his infatuation with the American movie star, Tristessa de St Ange, recalling how he receives oral pleasure from a date that he takes to see one of her movies. Okay, so yes. This in an interesting book. A bizarre, hallucinatory, interesting book that explores sex and gender and mythology. And... 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.

The sequence of the book goes from one sexual experience to another. Evelyn meets a woman, Leilah, in a chemist, and follows her to her flat where they have a truncated relationship in which he abuses her and lives on her money until he gets her pregnant, organises an abortion, takes her hemorrhaging to a clinic, and flees from New York. Although originally intending to go to New Orleans, after the disaster of the abortion Evelyn heads instead into "the desert", where the car runs out of petrol, and Evelyn, parched, waits to die. Eve gets an opportunity to test the views about womanhood that had influenced her via film when she was a male. However, she realises that the world of film is an illusion: surrealist theory is derived from a synthesis of Freud and Hegel that only those without a specialist knowledge of either psychoanalysis or philosophy might have dared to undertake." 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 Evelyn undergoes not just a physical transformation, but a metaphysical one, which s/he associates with the desert experience:Eve and Tristessa escape to the desert where they embrace their sexualities and fall in love with each other. However, they are then approached by a gang of young mafia boys who shoot Tristessa and ‘save’ Eve. She manages to escape the gang and then encounters Lilith who is actually Leilah posing as the new rebellion gang leader. Lilith takes Eve to the coast to be reunited with Mother and here they witness an old lady who acts as a metaphor of aging superficially with her fake hair, heavy make-up and bad hygiene. Eve comes to the realization that Leilah was a manifestation of Evelyn’s corruption and lust. Mille volte preferisco leggere un saggio piuttosto che un romanzo dove la fantasia non è libera ma incatenata a forme di pensiero razionale. Still, the two protagonists share the duality of male and female in their nature. Inevitably, in the manner of a fairy tale, they fall in love and consummate their relationship physically. As night comes to an end and the sun rises, so too does the drama (in a reversal of the course of a Greek play, which ends at sunset):

I think it was Rilke who so lamented the inadequacy of our symbolism -regretted so bitterly we cannot, unlike the (was it?) Ancient Greeks, find adequate external symbols for the life within us – yes, that’s the quotation. But, no. He was wrong. Our external symbols must always express the life within us with absolute precision; how could they do otherwise, since that life has generated them? Therefore we must not blame our poor symbols if they take forms that seem trivial to us, or absurd, for the symbols themselves have no control over their own fleshly manifestations, however paltry they may be; the nature of our life alone has determined their forms. The remainder of the book could be a hallucination. Evelyn is captured for the first time (he is captured four times in all) and subjected to a sex change that makes him female (Eve) - not only does he/she look perfect, but he/she is able to reproduce. The second capture puts him/her in the control of a deranged man who repeatedly rapes him/her, and meets him/her up with a faded old movie star who he/she has long been interested in, whereupon he/her discovers that this faded beauty is a transvestite, and falls in love with him/her. He/she has one night of love with this man/woman movie star (becomes pregnant) and is captured again, his/her capturers killing the movie star. He/she escapes for a brief period of freedom, before he/she is again captured, this time by Leilah, now a freedom fighter in a war torn California - most of which has fallen in the sea - and taken to a safe place to have his/her baby. Eve undergoes some psycho-programming, ironically part of which is viewing some of Tristessa’s films. She is an object of Evelyn’s lust, a fictional American silent movie star: an embodiment of beauty, sorrow, and loneliness, who Zero hates obsessively. Zero But wait, there’s more. As a man, Evelyn was fascinated by a silent movie star named Tristessa de St Ange, loosely based on Greta Garbo but with an obvious helping of Marlene Dietrich thrown in for good measure. This particular associated is only gradually made clear with the revelation that Tristessa was actually all along an androgynous disguising himself as a woman.I KNOW NOTHING. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape.' The Passion of New Eve

Eve anticipates that the surgery will “free me from being, transform my ‘I’ into the other and, in doing so, annihilate it.” She had wandered endlessly within herself, but never met anybody, nobody…She who has been so beautiful consumed me. Solitude and melancholy, that is a woman’s life." He is a cruel male cult leader with only one eye and one leg. Zero hates Tristessa because she made him infertile. He is hideous in both appearance and inner world. Mother A violent and picaresque satire; a brilliant response to the Greek myth of Tiresias, The Passion of New Eve challenges the absurdity of gender stereotypes and archetypes of modern femininity. 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.

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Of course, that assertion can actually be interpreted to mean just one thing: the book still remains slightly ahead of its time, but it is merely a matter of waiting before it will eventually be able to slide easily right into the mainstream. Update this section! Ho concluso il 2017 commentando un libro che ho apprezzato molto. Non un romanzo ma un testo che, a cavallo tra il memoir e l’intervista, dispiega differenti esperienze di donne che hanno lottato.