The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

by Daniel Mendelsohn

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Queer, LGBT, Memoir, Philosophy, Gay

225 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Daniel Mendelsohn is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large. His books include The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, and, most recently, Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate.

Reviews

[Ayelet Waldman]

Okay, he's my friend, but even if he weren't I would be blown away by the originality, the creativity, the verve of this book.

[Mel Bossa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very well written and unique in its perspective. I loved discovering Chelsea in NYC during the late 80s and early 90s through his astute eye and how he used geography, personal history, mythology (which he is obviously passionate about and fluent in latin and greek) and paternity to examine our dualities and the intersections of identity--gender, cultural, and sexual. But it was missing vulnerability.

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tested my patience from page one. This is the kind of drawn-out, self-conscious, "tasteful" memoir that reeks of 1990's gay/liberal/respectability-or-bust journalism. Maddeningly coy, partially to shield the sensibilities of a certain version of straight reader (who may or may not actually exist), and partially to disavow the author's own emotions. Titanically over-intellectualized, with clumsy winks at wit and a prissy attitude about sex, all I could think was, "This guy is TERRIFIED of his boner." Petticoats, petticoats, petticoats.

[Nathanial · Rating 3 out of 5]

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).

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Anyone who thinks that their grad-school reading and lackluster love-life deserves to be turned into a memoir is probably a raving narcissist, but Mendelsohn has gone above and beyond and written a truly ugly book. I have often heard “The Elusive Embrace” described as an intelligent queer classic. What I found when I read it was that no amount of lyric digressions on Greek myth can disguise the racism and homophobia (yes, homophobia) at its core.

The book pitches itself as a meditation on the mystery of personal identity, but Mendelsohn’s own identity is obvious (just not to him): he is a typical rich white gay man who prefers the company of others whites. The weirdly eroticizing hymn to Southern Confederate culture (pp 17-18) is so grotesque that it has to be read to be believed, but it’s really not surprising, given Mendelsohn’s proud sexual obsession with blond, blue-eyed white Southern men (pp 75). Although the setting is New York, there is only one non-white character in the whole book, a Cuban hook-up who is defined by being forgettable (“whose name I can’t remember if indeed I ever knew it”), not looking “Latin”, and low-income (pp 11).

But although Mendelsohn prefers the company of other white gays, this doesn’t mean he actually *likes* them. Gay friends are referenced but almost never encountered; he hates gay bars and prefers online chat rooms. He refers to gay eroticism as a form of “play” but is himself utterly devoid of humor or lightness. He prides himself on being a seducer but comes across everywhere as a manipulative creep, one whose sexuality is - as he frankly admits - predicated on using people like objects (pp 87-88). Solidarity in this world is non-existent: he feels no camaraderie with other gays and is considerably more moved by Sophocles’ Antigone than by young men dying of AIDS (the passage on pp 180-81 is chillingly callous). In short, he is typical case of gay self-loathing. Obviously it’s not his fault for being messed up in the head like this, but the attempt to pass off this squalid neurosis as “the Truth of Gay Nature” is by turns risible and sad.

The problem with this book is not that its author is a cruel, humorless, self-absorbed jerk with weird racial hang-ups (after all, the memoir genre is meant to be a safe space for disclosing personal vices). The problem is that Mendelsohn’s scant interest in other people compounds with his lack of self-awareness in a monster of solipsism that cannot *not* result in extreme artistic bathos (the cringe-inducing rhapsody on the last 2 pages is a case in point).

[Ioana · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was a promise attached to this book, something about the joys of gay sex and falling completely into another. And there is such a fragment. But the rest of the book is meant to contradict this thesis. It is a book about aloofness, about splitting your life into two pieces that are kept into two different locations.
What surprises in this book is the relentlessness with which the author exposes the roots of his identity. He digs deep into family relations, exposing the myths and the people with a persistence of a country priest. Unless you are Saint Simon or Chateaubriand, there is no need to tell so detailed stories about your aunties and your grandpa. There are feelings that don't transpose well into prose, that don't become interesting notwithstanding how great the writer is.
The last disconcerting thing about this book is the limited mentions of the AIDS impact on NY gay scene. The boys wither and disappear, the pain is muffled and hidden. No one is so close that any sort of solidarity has to be shown. Somehow there is no-one important enough to nurse through this disease, there is no protest, no indignation, only a short mention of playing safe. The gods (maybe Apollo himself) have blessed our author - in all this turmoil, he gets out unscathed. And still he looks away, trying to make sense of other stories.
There is no identity with the other. There is no losing yourself into the other. It is just a short visit one pays to beauty. This Narcissus won't die of hunger.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was published before The Lost, and I think it shows. The Riddle of Identity has a similar style (addressing different aspects of the issue through the lens of academic commentary) and it covers a lot of the same areas of Mendelsohn's family history, but in both senses, it feels less cohesive and less compelling.

The first explanation of the μεν, δε dilemma is something any student of Ancient Greek will appreciate, and his commentary on ancient texts is readable and accessible to all. His discussion of his sexual identity felt more like a casual chat with a long-winded friend -- the kind who makes a lot of generalizations based on his own experience. I enjoyed reading about his family's own myths, but not as much as I did when reading The Lost. I rounded my 1.5 star review up to two because I believe this would have held my interest better had I not already read The Lost, but as it stands, I was ready to be finished with this book about 3/4 of the way through.

[James Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Effortlessly masterful, Mendelsohn weaves his expertise as a classical scholar into his Jewish heritage to narrate his experience of "identity"--as a son, as a godfather, as a gay man "just outside" Chelsea. The result is a meditation on the nuances and messiness of "identity"--and hence the silliness of identity politics--that, quite apart from Mendelsohn's intentions, has a lot to teach religious communities in a secular age.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Die Teile des Buches mit der griechischen Mythologie trafen mein Interesse. Nach dem Buch "die Verlorenen" vom Daniel Mendelsohn greift er auch hier wieder seine Familiengeschichte Bolechow betreffend auf. Trotzdem es sich nicht um meine Familie handelt, erzählt er darüber äußerst spannend. Bezug zu Polen bzw. Schlesien habe ich Das nächste Buch von ihm liegt bereits griffbereit.

[m · Rating 2 out of 5]

not a good book from an otherwise astute critic.

[Janet Wolkoff · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish Daniel Mendelsohn hadn't published this book.
It was too personal and should have been kept private.

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Laura Eppinger]

Absolutely stunning nonfiction prose. I deliberately read this slowly so I could savor.

My used copy has a back cover description like, This is an erotic book about how cruising draws from ancient Greek traditions/imagery. And sure, it is that. But it's so much more; Mendelsohn explores family, identity, NYC vs its suburbs, our parents and the parents we become and how we parent ourselves.

This is also of its time and preserves an interesting moment in culture and history: 1999, in both Manhattan and Princeton, and what both urban and suburban scenes were like for gay men. No legal protections for queer couples. The shadow of Reagan stretching long. HIV/AIDS looming large. All of that baggage, while wanting beauty and novel experience and a new boy to meet on the street and go home with.

I feel weird about a star rating, as I always do. One section with tons of gender essentialism is really off-putting today: all women just wanna make babies and be mothers, really?!? But it just reminds me to be grateful that a much more expansive understanding of gender is available widely now, to me as a Millennial, and certainly to all the generations who come after me. I know legally married queer couples who are doing the normie suburban thing, and yet, I also know queer folks living their best genderfluid polyam lives in cities, and there are SO many nuances and stops in-between!

I have no idea what the ancient Greek philosophers would say about Grindr.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nearly twenty years after its original publication, this unique book continues to defy classification. Part memoir, part family history, part socio-cultural critique—The Elusive Embrace resonates as a late 20th-century/early 21st-century chronicle of the ambivalent lives that many gay men lead.

As a Classics scholar, Mendelsohn informs his observations of contemporary life with relevant analogues from Greek language and drama. Using the Greek construction of “men” and “de” (i.e., “On the one hand…but then again, on the other…”), Mendelsohn (whose surname begins with the combination of these two Greek syllables) demonstrates the conflated binaries of his own life (men, as an intellectual…de, as a sexual being) as well as broader humanistic concerns (men, the desire for love…de, the love of desire).

The references to AOL chat rooms now seem quaint, and the somewhat lengthy chronicle of his family’s history in the latter quarter of the book gets a bit tedious, but ultimately, Mendelsohn’s transcendent prose and the sheer power of his youthful memories will strike a bittersweet chord with many gay men of a certain age.

[Tamara · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nic · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Sebastián Bravo Montenegro · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Manar · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot of really wonderful snd beautiful insight in this book. Lots of highlighting going on for me. But that being said, I didn’t enjoy the mythology and the extensive family history parts quite as much. When the author really gets to the point of the subject matter it’s wonderful but there was a lot of filler as well.

[Virginie Dolléans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Toujours aussi fin et intéressant.
Une étude sur l’identité par l’auteur des “Disparus” que j’adore !
En fait, c’est son premier livre qu’il faudrait donc lire avant, mais ce n’est pas grave.
Histoires, Généalogie, vérités et mensonges, qui suis-je ?
Ensuite je lirai le 3e de la série “Un père, un fils, une épopée”.

[Hal · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable, insightful and enlightening memoir. The author's journalistic style seems to be a dogged pursuit of the truth - I think this works a little better when the object of investigation is his murdered relatives (The Lost) or his father (An Odyssey), than when it's himself.

[Kate]

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.

[Pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice prose, but a bit curdled if you're not gay or from out of town.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

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

[Em Setzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[MrDalloway · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

How does one resolve the mystery of his own identity? Can one understand the rest of the world if he does not know himself first? These questions and more form the themes of this rare if not unique memoir. Daniel Mendelsohn shares his own personal history through essays on the ways that he, and by reference we, defines himself. The geographies, paternities, mythologies and what he calls multiplicities lead him to a summary section that discusses identities. Concluding at the end of his musings that "you live in the middle voice, you are here and you are there," (p 206), and this is the cumulative result of the experiences of a life - our personal mythology. By weaving into his personal experience the lessons of classical mythology (Ovid et. al.) Mendelsohn pursues the nature of the desire. Since Plato discussed the relationship between eros and the good this question has been a critical part of human existence. The Elusive Embrace updates the search for the nature of this relationship and its part in the "riddle of identity". Beautifully written and deeply felt this is a book to return to again and again.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my nightstand I have a collection of books that I am slowly wading through. As I order my nighttime reading from the local library it means that sometimes I have little to read and at others too much. I just finished reading Daniel Mendelson's The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1999). The book is a fascinating although often odd memoir about Mendelsohn's exploration of homosexual desire interwoven with classical myths that are part of his training as a classicist. Although he is better known for The Lost: A Search for Six Million a book that chronicles his search for relatives lost during the Holocaust The Elusive Embrace, a memoir of desire maps how it is related to concepts of self, especially for gay men. Although at times the book and his writing can be a bit odd (often laced with overreaching prose and narratives of the one that got away) I enjoy reading memoirs about sexuality and desire and how individuals navigate such territories.

[Miriam Jacobs · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Chani · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.