Though this book has a lot of great content and philosophy, it is also oddly organized and tends to lag in places.

Biog M5374m 2000

there is a reason Daniel Mendelsohn is an acclaimed memoir writer; one gets the sense he couldn’t (and shouldn’t) write in any other form. simultaneously explicit and coy. the Greek connections are tenuous at times, but not irrevocably so. the tenderest section of meat was of course Mendelsohn’s revelations on parenthood.

This was Mendelsohn's literary debut and he was already a master in connecting personal stuff –in this case about his childhood and homosexuality, general reflections on desire and identity and a study on the classics. His memories are touching but not as powerful as the way he re-visits the past inThe Lost; his cruising New York streets in quest of "boys" he could play with isn't the most interesting side of the book though; his take on male desire, or rather on homosexual desire is insightful but it isn't that refreshing. However as soon as he starts diving into Greek and Latin, and connecting his thoughts to either Myths or tragedies it's simply wonderful.

And of course, it's well-written.

Quite beautifully woven. These are grand subjects i thought I'd outgrown: in fact, I've merely been crossing a mesa, and a gentle descent awaits.

A really beautiful book; a skillful weaving together of personal history and literature.

a meditative look into identity and what, exactly, we mean by the word itself. is it a singularity, an irreducible ~something~ that makes us what we are, or is it a conflictedness, a bifurcation in us, an x, yet y, that defines us best? how do we reconcile our multiplicities, or better yet, how do we distinguish them? from what i can see from the reviews, this isn’t mendelsohn’s magnum opus, which makes me thrilled to read the rest of his work.

A book about the journey of a gay man makes to define his own identity and it fits into the grand scheme of society. It is filled with passages that reflect so accurately on gay life and what it means to be gay. It is so surprising that all of us, as gay men, go through what seems like the exact same experiences and thoughts. It reminds me that in the specific lies the universal. The ending pages of the book are delightful and beautifully written.

There are some long passages about the author’s family that were too long for my liking but it makes for it with a surprising twist at the end.

So many niche and articulate insights - which often feel like you'd been grasping to say them to yourself for a long time

tremendously honest, a page turner

Wow. What a self-reflective read. Daniel Mendelsohn's words are poignant for every one at some point.....gay or not, (because sex is only one part of the whole essence called You.). Mendelsohn words, rich with the poetry of Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, are universal in scope. History of humanity repeats the stitching of timeline dots with the same sense for desire....to love something, and to be loved by someone; passion within both sides of the greener pastures. Growing.

"This is the place where I decided to live, the place of paradox and hybrids. The place that, in the moment of choosing it, taught me that wherever I am is the wrong place for half of me...." (pg.35)

...and I would agree that in turn it's the right place for the other half....always.

Bottom line; In life, I think,
roots and wings are essential. Because
Truth is moving
from point to point, the same,
exposing the absurd
of us in their image.

Simply, like a lily, enjoy
the linking; the here and there
halves, stem and flower parts,
fire and rain zeal,
all in one very short breath.

Desire and the Riddle of Identity is the subtitle for this book.

How can we both desire love and still love to be the object of desire? "Identity, the Greeks knew, is a paradox," says Daniel Mendelsohn at the end of Geographies, the first chapter of The Elusive Embrace; the next four chapters - Multiplicities, Paternities, Mythologies, and Identities - elaborate this paradox, not to solve it, but to parse out the strands that make him who he is, follow them along their sources, and speculate to their further unbindings and collusions. He writes, almost evenly, half of the book's vignettes in an autobiographical mode, tracing his life as a middle-class gay Jew, and half in an expository, etymological mode, going back to Greek myth and language for fertile frameworks of his explorations. Just as he explains that he divides half of his days (alternating between the Chelsea's anonymous tricks and the suburban house where he helps raise a young child), he argues - no, not argues, rather 'puts forth' passages like these:

"Greek grammar, unlike most others, unlike Latin, the language of the practical Romans, has a special verbal mode called 'the middle voice,' which is neither active nor passive but, in a way, both at once: a voice in which the subject of the verb is also its object; diadoumenos, for example, is a participle in the middle voice: the one binding his head/whose head is being bound, the beautiful boy who ties a ribbon around his own head / around whose head a ribbon is being tied, adorning and adorned, subject and object."

How does such a figure avoid hypocrisy and acknowledge both aspects of its being? Mendelsohn goes on, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, chapter after chapter, to model this duality as an epistemology, to demonstrate how he lives both 'here' and 'not-here' when the utopia of gay enclaves is a 'no-place' both because of the fantasies that support it and the stigmas that would ignore, deny, or destroy it. Simultaneously, he elucidates unspoken aspects of the 'here' by relating, in complementary if fragmented juxtaposition, both the stories of exile and exuberance that led his grandparents to escape the Naziis and eventually raise a family, and the conversations that brought him to the position of being a 'male role-model' for a young boy. Mendelsohn's strength comes to the fore when he examines, in disturbing and fascinating detail, how he is still in the middle voice of masculinity himself: both being bound by his grandfather's example, and binding himself (yes, he does get into erotics) with the trappings of his gay ghetto, both raising a child and being raised by a child.

The quiet inhibition of his writing spills across these mythic comparisons, and it is that very boundlessness which reveals Mendelsohn's own limitations: he has a difficulty holding this material all together in one book. He may have realized this himself, especially upon the writing of his second book, The Lost, in which he recounts his efforts to learn the stories of the lost six ancestors who didn't make it out of Europe. Released this year, The Lost is a hydra-headed travelogue, historical essay, and autobiography, yet domesticated enough so that when you cut off one of it's heads (or speculations), you get two more photographs dug out of dusty trunks, two more people who knew his ancestors before they themselves escaped, two more storylines, in fact, which in turn open two more avenues of inquiry. If Daniel Mendelsohn is cursed with infinite material, it is an enviable curse. Luckily for us, he handles it well - or does it handle him?(cue mood music here).