The Passion Of New Eve (Virago Modern Classics)

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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: Eve escapes but is captured, raped, and enslaved by Zero, a cruel male cult leader and "poet" with only one eye and one leg. His harem are all passive, slavish "wives" who he whips unless they talk in grunts and honour their bedfellows, the pigs. Zero leads Eve on a search for the silent film star Tristessa, an embodiment of beauty, sorrow, and loneliness, whom he hates obsessively, because he believes Tristessa has made him infertile. Tristessa was Evelyn's first object of desire in his boyhood, and Eve still has her own obsession with this figure. 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. 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.

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. 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! This is just happening in the seats. On the screen, Tristessa represents universal conceptions of womanhood and beauty. They define Evelyn’s ideal of feminine beauty, not to mention the nature of a personal and sexual relationship. Tristessa. Enigma. Illusion. Woman? Ah!...and all you signified was false! Your existence was only notional; you were a piece of pure mystification, Tristessa. Nevertheless, [you were] as beautiful as only things that don't exist can be, most haunting of paradoxes, that recipe for perennial dissatisfaction."

At the start of the novel, Evelyn, a male English professor, is taking up a new post in a university in New York. His tribute to Tristessa de St Ange, a (fictional) American silent movie star, on his last night in England is to be given fellatio by a girl he takes to see one of her films.

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. 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. Mother has made herself into an incarnated deity; she has quite transformed her flesh, she has undergone a painful metamorphosis of the entire body and become the abstraction of a natural principle." 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:

My thrift store copy came annotated with a ballpoint pen, and here are just a few of the gems it offered: There will be minor spoilers; necessary to have any meaningful discussion of the novel; however in many ways the plot isn’t the point, the ideas are. The focus of the novel is Evelyn, an Englishman starting a university job in New York. His travels across the US are Odyssey like and he experiences strange, fabulous and bizarre things. During the journey he becomes Eve, losing more than just the lyn at the end of his name; but learning and becoming, a metamorphosis by surgery. Having been abusive towards a woman in New York called Leilah, Eve now experiences a male world. The gender change was without choice and so implies no change in awareness; consequently there is a male identity in a female body. The experiences that follow result in comprehension rather than integration. I found it impossible to discuss the themes of the novel that interested me, without revealing two aspects of the plot. 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

Eve doesn’t get far; a masked woman kidnaps him. She takes him to a mysterious town called Beulah. Men are not allowed inside Beulah, but the woman makes an exception for Eve. She has special plans for him. To Eve’s horror, the woman introduces him to Mother, the Queen of Beulah. She transformed her body so that she looks like an ancient goddess with many breasts. Before Eve can run away, Mother rapes him, collects his semen, and performs a sex change operation on him.

Evelyn undergoes not just a physical transformation, but a metaphysical one, which s/he associates with the desert experience: So hypocrites that we were, we spared ourselves the final hypocrisy of love. Or, I saved myself from that most brutal of all assaults, the siege of the other."