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The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

daniel mendelsohn

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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.

223 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1999

This edition

Format
223 pages, Paperback
Published
June 20, 2000 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
ISBN
9780375706974
ASIN
0375706976
Language
English

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About the author

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daniel mendelsohn

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Rating(4.2 / 5.0, 45 votes)
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45 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
AlterSaber569
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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A beautiful and intriguing book. Some parts seem to bore you and you just don't see the point to them. But Mendelssohn always brings it back to the core of the book, knowing your desire and the confusing but profound insight into "who we are". It's spectacular how he divided the book into five portions and each one brings something deep and familiar but entirely novel into your life and I think that's the greatest feat of this book. It just adds up magnificently.
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JingNiijima
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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As a woman reader, I occasionally felt pretty alienated from Mendelsohn's discussion of the gay male experience, despite being queer myself. Still, the writing itself is quite beautiful and stunning, and the way he weaves together personal narrative with mythology and philosophy is really breathtaking.
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tiggernits
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Mendelsohn is a remarkable writer. Impeccable! in fact. This memoir weaves Greek Myth, personal history, and identity; exploring Mendelsohn's divided life, the embracement of gay culture and fatherhood.

"Children are the secret weapon of straight culture: they have the potential to rescue men from inconsequentiality. Fatherhood has the power to confer authenticity on men; it can be what saves them from eternally being boys themselves." (p.104)

"In a picture, it is always NOW. In a picture, if you're lucky, you are always beautiful." (p.133)

"You find a way to compromise. You stare longingly at the figure in the distance, the beautiful image that you found, one day, in a classroom or a cemetery, when you didn't even know what it was you were looking for, but you move on. You find the spaces in between, and you live." (p.204)

My favourite passage is the ending but I refrain from quoting so as not to spoil those last lines for other readers.
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Marl-Karx
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Daniel Mendelsohn est un de mes auteurs favoris, la façon qu'il a de mêler la petite histoire et les récits bibliques et mythologiques est très fine, pleine d'enseignements lumineux et de sensibilité.

Dans ce premier livre, le moins connu, il établit ce qui deviendra sa marque de fabrique : renvoi permanent enrte études érudites des langues anciennes et de leurs significations symboliques et historiographie familiale.
Mendelsohn s'attache ici à parler de la découverte de son homosexualité, à travers classiquement le mythe de Narcisse de l'amour du même, mais aussi de l'idiome du Grec Ancien men (μέν) ... de (δέ) ... qui est à la fois la juxtaposition d'une part / d'autre part, mais qui sous-entend aussi la continuité et l'unité, équivalent de notre "en même temps" macronien.

Ensuite, il s'attache à souligner l'alterité que lui apportera son rôle de père de substitution auprès de son amie Rose.

Sur la fin de l'ouvrage, il esquisse avec le récit de son grand père fabulateur en chef au sujet de sa grande tante promise comme contre-partie à l'immigration de sa famille polonaise auprès des cousins déjà établis en Amérique, qui mourra une semaine avant sa noce, histoire familiale qu'on retrouvera dans son ouvrage Les Disparus sur les mensonges, la reconstruction et la mythification de cette histoire. Ca sera le mythe d'Antigone qui servira de toile de fond au discours de l'obiligation familiale contre les lois de la cité.

Il y a beaucoup de réflexions sensibles et profondes :
- p. 33 : "la Grèce captive a conquis son brutal envahisseur et a apporté les arts dans l'Italie sauvage." (Horace)
- "Ce qui est inhérent à cette langue [grecque], par conséquent, c'est la reconnaissance du caractère profusément conflictuel des choses. " (au sujet de men ... de...)
- "Car cette information confortait une perception de moi-même qui avait été cruciale dans la formation de mon identité, aussi longtemps que je pouvais m'en souvenir : cette part de moi qui trouvait un plaisir érotique et intellectuel à sentir que j'nétais jamais moi-même complètement absorbé dans une chose ou un lien ou une expérience et que, quoi que je fass, quoi que j'éprouve, il y avait en moi un endroit que je gardais en réserve, qui me donnait du surplomb sur moi-même."
- Topos le terme utilisé pour décrire certains concepts stéréotypes à la fois dans la littérature et dans la politique, est un mot grec qui signifie en réalité endroit - l'idée étant que nous revenons à des tournures de phrase ou à des habitudes de pensée familières avec autant de soulagement que nous rentrons chez nous ou dans notre quartier.
- les Grecs savaient que l'identité n'était pas une réponse, mais l'énigme en soi.
- Le mot identité vient en fin de compte de l'adverbe latin identidem, qui signifie répétitivement. Identidem n'est en fait rien de plus qu'une duplication du mot idem, le "même" : idem (et) idem. L'une des manières au moins de déterminer ce qu'est une chose est de voir si, après tout, elle reste toujours elle-même et rien d'autre.
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skaterperson777
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Like the man and de Mendehlson draws upon to contextualize his own life-which-is-not-one, my feelings about The Elusive Embrace are irreducibly multiple. At points I was annoyed; how could Mendehlson generalize about gay male youth (both physical and libidinal) despite inhabiting a very particular milieu that could never be a proper microcosm? While it seems palpable that gayness fucks your social functioning a little, forcing you to live a life which is always, if only a fragment, unruly (Mendehlson the Classics professor/Mendehlson the Boy/not as irreparable self but as multitudinous identity), sexual drive strikes me as something so liquid that, though it may be shaped by one’s gender performance, is always moving away from any category. But I can forgive this, for though he might not be doing so explicitly, Mendehlson is tuning himself into his own lived experience: his tendency toward faux-anthropological statements gestures to his fascination with the subject as a boy, his fascination with beautiful mythologies as styles of survival are descended from his mother. As Hilton Als observed, Mendehlson avoids the syrupy; he’s honest without self-pity, controlled without defensiveness. Really, the Schrödinger’s box of feelings suffusing The Elusive Embrace—this mixture of lineages that can’t help be one and not at all simultaneously—indicates a book that embodies that which it asks its reader. I’m happy to be generous, as if speaking to an intelligent friend whom, though I may often disagree with, keeps me me thinking.
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Misbah_shah
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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The Elusive Embrace is not Mendelsohn's strongest work, but that is as it should be, since he seems at the time of publication to be still finding his voice as a writer. I suspect the award garnering has more to do with the writer's frankness with regard to his subject than the merits of the writing. The speaker does not begin with a thesis he uses experience to prove, but, rather, explores experience - a perceived duality of nature and sense of specialness - to uncover a thesis - a genuine exploration, neither pat nor smug. He is conscious of arguing against the grain in addressing the myth of Narcissus and Echo, but he tells the truth about what he feels, aware that it may be currently incorrect, politically speaking, I feel, historically speaking, it is an important beginning for him personally, as a writer, but least in significance with regard to his body of work.
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deoxyribose64
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I’ve never read anything quite like this meditation on the different facets of identity. It is gorgeously written. I had to stop and reread and think about different parts of this book multiple times.
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