Product Description

'I know nothing. I am a tabula erasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself...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. 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 PASSION OF NEW EVE is an extraordinary journey into the apocalyptic vision of the author Lorna Sage called 'The boldest of English writers'.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51150 in Books
• Published on: 1992-08-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Review
'If you can imagine Baudelaire, Blake and Kafka getting together to describe America, you are well on the way to Carter's visionary and lurid world' THE TIMES 'Her writing is pyrotechnic' OBSERVER

About the Author
One of Britain's most original writers, Angela Carter published her first novel, SHADOW DANCE, in 1965. Carter's death in 1992 'robbed the English literary scene of one of its most vivacious and compelling voices' (INDEPENDENT).

Customer Reviews

Passionately Postmodern!
Angela Carter's novel Passion of New Eve is an intelligent discourse centred around ideas of gender as a performance and gender assignment. By the end of the novel names and gender roles are so obscured and blurry that they become obsolete, the 'act' of 'being' is nothing more than a performance like that of the famous actress.

Tristessa is the ultimate figure of feminine masochism, but isn't all that she seems, neither is Englishman Evelyn who later becomes Eve - Mother's mythic vision of the ultimate woman modelled on the playboy centrefold...

Some like to analyse it, others like to read it!
One of the sad consequences of Angela Carter's political stance is that her work will be read under the analytical microscope, just as I read this book the first time round. Regardless of any such speculative dissection, it is a beautiful, warm, subtly erotic story and in a league of its own. It is more likely to appeal to the unselfconscious, more adventurous reader.

What it means not what it says
Many of Angela Carter's books have their strength more in their meaning than in the story. TPONE is one of these- the plot being bitty and some of it superfluous. But the plot is not really what it is about- the idea of a mysogynistic man being turned into a woman then suffering the treatment he himself would have formally condoned is a strong premise and one which naturally throws up many questions in itself.
Essentially very deep TPONE fails where its meandering plot leads it astray. This is more of a book for Carter-holics than a goof place to start. The Magic Toyshop is a softer introduction and The Insane Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman a similar work to TPONE but a less infuriating read.