You were an illusion in a void. You were the living image of the entire Platonic shadow show, an illusion that could fill my own emptiness with marvelous, imaginary things as long as, just so long as, the movie lasted, and then all would vanish… [You yourself would live only] as long as ‘persistence of vision’."

Eve realises that Leilah never objectively existed but was only a manifestation of his own lusts and corruption. 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. My thrift store copy came annotated with a ballpoint pen, and here are just a few of the gems it offered: 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."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:

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." 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 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. Wow - her writing is pyrotechnic - it says on the cover - and its a bloody good way of describing 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."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, the male narrator, starts the novel with a scene in a London cinema in which he receives a blow job, while watching Tristessa, the most beautiful woman in the world, on screen. On Wikipedia it states "Cater's writings are intertextual webs." Wikipedia states also that "Intertextuality is the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts." After Evelyn leaves New York he learns that a crisis has occurred there - called "the Siege of Harlem". I looked this up to find it was the title of a book printed in 1964, by Warren Miller, a book described as "a serious fairy tale" by one review that I read. I cannot identify the other texts that need to be consulted to work out the meaning of this book - it's possible they are out of vogue, and out of print. 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.

For instance I wonder what to make of the fact that Evelyn lost his desire for Leilah when she became pregnant, and that when Eve became pregnant, the copious sex forced on her vanishes - she is captured by children, religious children, old enough to be sexual, but who want only her mothering. And what to make of the fact that when the movie star transsexual is forced to penetrate Eve he falls in love with her - becoming, I suppose, the man he never was, by sleeping with a woman who is in fact a man? Well, it's all a mystery to me. I repeat: this is MY OPINION. As I'm neither going to run for president nor marry a Third World dictator (wait, that might actually be an option) please respect it. Because I'm about to tell you how I changed my mind... for once. Still, Evelyn learns something about himself, and what it was that really attracted him about his lover: The women in The Passion of New Eve exist in the middle of a phallocentric panopticon and, being so, are subjected to scrutiny, evaluation and judgment by a distorting male gaze. This can be seen when Eve has just been created, in the way Evelyn looks and reacts to this new body. The character of Eve, just after the operation has just been performed, is still Evelyn, but just in a ‘female’ body. Psychologically, he is still Evelyn, the man. Although he is quite aware of the change in the body, his mindset of a male being is still kept. He feels ‘a discrepancy between outward female appearance and a sense of himself as internally male’. He initially intends to reverse the surgery and therefore ‘reacts to the new female body as a garment he will wear only temporarily’. The Mother also knows that he needs to be programmed into performing as a woman and that the mere act of being in a female body is not enough to make someone a woman. She ensures that Evelyn, as Eve, is subjected to having to sit through hours upon hours of female related propaganda and similar things until Eve is fully conditioned to understand female suffering. It’s almost as if until Eve has the experiences that women have grown up dealing with, and readjusts his appropriating male gaze to include a female perspective, she cannot truly be a she, despite having all the necessary biological parts. Being in a female body is not enough to ensure femininity and until she has undertaken the programming, she lives in a liminality of gender-identity.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. Mille volte preferisco leggere un saggio piuttosto che un romanzo dove la fantasia non è libera ma incatenata a forme di pensiero razionale. But Eve discovers one more illusion or deception: Tristessa is actually a male masquerading as an actress modeled on the likes of Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.

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. In Pynchon, Barth and Coover]...the exuberance and variety of the imaginative life [manifests] itself in all its convulsive beauty..."

When I saw Tristessa was a man, I felt a great wonder since I witnessed, as in a revelation, the grand abstraction of desire in this person who represented the refined essence of all images of love and the dream." Beulah, the “Woman’s Town” in the desert, is a place where ”contrarieties are equally true…where contrarieties exist together.” Woman has the been the antithesis in the dialect of creation quite long enough." The Passion of New Eve