From Publishers Weekly
Goldstein's The Dark Sister is a cleverly constructed, imaginative tale that centers on a tormented feminist novelist whose solitude is interrupted only by phone calls from her silly but dangerous sister; March will also bring Penguin's reissue of Goldstein's penetrating coming-of-age novel The Mind-Body Problem , about an orthodox Jewish woman's sexual awakening at college.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"The Mind-Body Problem" is in fact written by a philosopher, and really is not about mathematics. It is about an intelligent young lady, Renee Feuer, who marries a world-renown mathematician, Noam Himmel, out of her insecurity: "...In short I was floundering [at Princeton as a grad student], and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage. And, given the nature of my distress, no one could better play the part of my rescuing hero than the great Noam Himmel. For the man had an extravagance of what I was so agonizingly feeling the lack of: objective proof of one's own intellectual merit." Renee, born into an orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey, is self-acknowledging beautiful, and perhaps can be best characterized in her own words: "I had always thought of intelligence as power, the supreme power. Understanding is not the means of mastery, but the end itself (Spinoza)...I am only attracted to men who I believe to be more intelligent than I am. A detected mistake in logic considerably cools my desire. They can be shorter, they can be weaker, they can be poorer, they can be meaner, but they must be smarter. For the smart are the masters in my mattering region. And if you gain power over them, then through the transivity of power you too are powerful."
Goldstein's The Dark Sister is a cleverly constructed, imaginative tale that centers on a tormented feminist novelist whose solitude is interrupted only by phone calls from her silly but dangerous sister; March will also bring Penguin's reissue of Goldstein's penetrating coming-of-age novel The Mind-Body Problem , about an orthodox Jewish woman's sexual awakening at college.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"The Mind-Body Problem" is in fact written by a philosopher, and really is not about mathematics. It is about an intelligent young lady, Renee Feuer, who marries a world-renown mathematician, Noam Himmel, out of her insecurity: "...In short I was floundering [at Princeton as a grad student], and thus quite prepared to follow the venerably old feminine tradition of being saved by marriage. And, given the nature of my distress, no one could better play the part of my rescuing hero than the great Noam Himmel. For the man had an extravagance of what I was so agonizingly feeling the lack of: objective proof of one's own intellectual merit." Renee, born into an orthodox Jewish family in New Jersey, is self-acknowledging beautiful, and perhaps can be best characterized in her own words: "I had always thought of intelligence as power, the supreme power. Understanding is not the means of mastery, but the end itself (Spinoza)...I am only attracted to men who I believe to be more intelligent than I am. A detected mistake in logic considerably cools my desire. They can be shorter, they can be weaker, they can be poorer, they can be meaner, but they must be smarter. For the smart are the masters in my mattering region. And if you gain power over them, then through the transivity of power you too are powerful."
Interesting read . . .
Written by an author with a PhD in philosophy, this novel explores the relationship of woman philosopher with a physicist who is a genius. She's interested in his mind and he's interested in her body. Sound familiar?
