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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
I as sort of hoping that reading this would answer the questions around whether one of my favourite authors was transphobic. It didn't. I enjoyed it a lot of the most part, despite the troubling aspects--and hoo boy are there trouble aspects. The writing itself is wonderful, and the final line is perfect. I suppose how offensive this book is depends on the reader in the end. I wish I could rate it more but I sort of feel like I'd be betraying myself if I did. I don't feel like Carter hated my kind, probably that she didn't really do any research on us and thought we might make a good metaphor for America.
I fucking love the despotic wanna-be many-breasted fertility goddess though.
I fucking love the despotic wanna-be many-breasted fertility goddess though.
Beautiful prose, but too violent, too abstract, too absurd for me.
This is a weird book.
It takes place in some sort of dystopian alternate-present, where New York is at the mercy of race and gender riots, and a wall is being built around Harlem by the National Guard. The rest of the country is falling apart too, as we find out through the course of the book. Evelyn is a young Englishman who has come to the US for a job, but it falls through essentially immediately and he is unwilling to go back home since he has met a prostitute and fallen into a sort of twisted, drug-fueled stasis with her. Eventually he sets out from New York on his own and then things get seriously strange.
Sometimes the book reads like some kind of gruesome horror- or disaster-porn, seedy and cheap. And then sometimes it reads like a tract on feminist theory. Neither was particularly my style. If you read this, expect a lot of gender stereotyping, role reversals, rape, kidnapping and helplessness.
Recommended for: Gloria Steinem, fans of fill-in-the-blank-sploitation movies, men in women's studies classes.
Quote: "She seemed to me a born victim and, if she submitted to the beatings and the degradations with a curious, ironic laugh that no longer tinkled - for I'd beaten the wind-bells out of her, I'd done that much - then isn't irony the victim's only weapon?"
It takes place in some sort of dystopian alternate-present, where New York is at the mercy of race and gender riots, and a wall is being built around Harlem by the National Guard. The rest of the country is falling apart too, as we find out through the course of the book. Evelyn is a young Englishman who has come to the US for a job, but it falls through essentially immediately and he is unwilling to go back home since he has met a prostitute and fallen into a sort of twisted, drug-fueled stasis with her. Eventually he sets out from New York on his own and then things get seriously strange.
Sometimes the book reads like some kind of gruesome horror- or disaster-porn, seedy and cheap. And then sometimes it reads like a tract on feminist theory. Neither was particularly my style. If you read this, expect a lot of gender stereotyping, role reversals, rape, kidnapping and helplessness.
Recommended for: Gloria Steinem, fans of fill-in-the-blank-sploitation movies, men in women's studies classes.
Quote: "She seemed to me a born victim and, if she submitted to the beatings and the degradations with a curious, ironic laugh that no longer tinkled - for I'd beaten the wind-bells out of her, I'd done that much - then isn't irony the victim's only weapon?"
I usually love Carter's writing, but this one just wasn't for me.
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Loveable characters:
No
a short whirlwind of a book about a man who gets turned into a woman by a feminist cult and then has to go through a lot of the ordeals that women often suffer through (big tw for rape and abuse). this was definitely a ride. the first half was pretty good and i was ready to give it 3 or 4 stars but then it got transphobic as hell and now i don't know what to think. the way she uses poc in this story is also pretty sus.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Rape, Transphobia
Moderate: Drug abuse
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Death, Rape, Abortion
Gorgeous writing, bonkers plot. A blunt statement about the male and its treatment of the female in a fantastical dystopian future. To sum up in three words: Gods, sex and violence. Possibly the weirdest book I’ve ever read. Not necessarily a bad thing.
There were parts of this book I absolutely loved and then parts of it I completely hated. The writing was beautiful but the main character starts out promising and ends up flat, and the various instances of rape that are mentioned offhand really bothered me. I think overall I'd give it a 2.5, rounding it up to a 3.
adventurous
mysterious
The Passion of New Eve was another book that I had to read for my Gender, Sex and Culture class for university. I'm normally a massive fan of Angela Carter's writing but TPONE was a story that I just couldn't wrap my head around.
*spoilers ahead*
New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
The protagonist is a young man, Evelyn, who arrives in New York from England to take up a teaching post in a University, but New York is extremely violent, the University is in the control of armed men (armed black men to be specific, so presumably it is a racial uprising), so Evelyn has no job.
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.
After that, 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 do they look perfect, but they are able to reproduce. The second capture puts them in the control of a deranged man - Zero - who repeatedly rapes them and is OBSESSED with a movie star called Tristessa who Eve is also obsessed with. Zero, his followers and Eve, and meet the old movie star whereupon they discovers that this movie star is a transvestite. Eve falls in love with him/her. Eve has one night of love with Tristessa and becomes pregnant. Eve is then captured again, and Eve's capturers kill Tristessa. Eve them escapes for a brief period of freedom, before they are 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 they're baby.
Part of me really wanted to love this book because it was written by Carter and it because it explores important themes of sexuality. However, I couldn't seem to understand what the hell was going on half of the time, I had to keep making notes on each chapter as to what had happened. Part of me thinks that this book is important to study because of the themes that it explores, but I really don't think that it was well written and I'm not even sure I'm glad that I've read it.
I found the book to be overly sexual, there was A LOT of rape and it made me very very uncomfortable - which I guess was kind of the point, but it was just too much. The ending was very ambiguous as well. I wasn't really sure what was happening, whether it was a metaphor for something bigger or whether it was just what it said. But I do think there was definitely something bigger going on.
I ended up writing a 3000 word essay on this book and how gender is represented, so hopefully I get a good grade for it! It's a real big shame that I didn't like the book though...
Disclaimer: this book contains triggers for rape, sexual abuse, forced surgery, paedophilia and transphobia.
*spoilers ahead*
New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
The protagonist is a young man, Evelyn, who arrives in New York from England to take up a teaching post in a University, but New York is extremely violent, the University is in the control of armed men (armed black men to be specific, so presumably it is a racial uprising), so Evelyn has no job.
“She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left”
― Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve
Part of me really wanted to love this book because it was written by Carter and it because it explores important themes of sexuality. However, I couldn't seem to understand what the hell was going on half of the time, I had to keep making notes on each chapter as to what had happened. Part of me thinks that this book is important to study because of the themes that it explores, but I really don't think that it was well written and I'm not even sure I'm glad that I've read it.
I found the book to be overly sexual, there was A LOT of rape and it made me very very uncomfortable - which I guess was kind of the point, but it was just too much. The ending was very ambiguous as well. I wasn't really sure what was happening, whether it was a metaphor for something bigger or whether it was just what it said. But I do think there was definitely something bigger going on.
I ended up writing a 3000 word essay on this book and how gender is represented, so hopefully I get a good grade for it! It's a real big shame that I didn't like the book though...
Disclaimer: this book contains triggers for rape, sexual abuse, forced surgery, paedophilia and transphobia.