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Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780140298482 ISBN: 0140298487 Label: Penguin (Non-Classics) Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 288 Publication Date: February 01, 2001 Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) Studio: Penguin (Non-Classics) Editorial Review: Product Description: Inspired by the true story of Danish painter Einar Wegener and his California-born wife, this tender portrait of a marriage asks: What do you do when someone you love wants to change? It starts with a question, a simple favor asked of a husband by his wife on an afternoon chilled by the Baltic wind while both are painting in their studio. Her portrait model has canceled, and would he mind slipping into a pair of women's shoes and stockings for a few moments so she can finish the painting on time. Of course, he answers. Anything at all. With that, one of the most passionate and unusual love stories of the twentieth century begins. Amazon.com Review: Though the title character of David Ebershoff's debut novel is a transsexual, the book is less concerned with transgender issues than the mysterious and ineffable nature of love. Loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who, in 1931, became the first man to undergo a sex-change operation, The Danish Girl borrows the bare bones of his story as a jumping-off point for an exploration of how Wegener's decisions affected the people around him. Chief among these is his Californian wife, Greta, also a painter, who unwittingly sets her husband's feet on the path to transformation. While trying to finish a portrait of an opera singer who has cancelled a sitting, she asks Einar to stand in for her subject, putting on her dress, stockings, and shoes. The moment silk touches his skin, he is shaken: Einar could concentrate only on the silk dressing his skin, as if it were a bandage. Yes, that was how it felt the first time: the silk was so fine and airy that it felt like a gauze--a balm-soaked gauze lying delicately on healing skin. Even the embarrassment of standing before his wife began to no longer matter, for she was busy painting with a foreign intensity in her face. Einar was beginning to enter a shadowy world of dreams where Anna's dress could belong to anyone, even to him.Greta soon recognizes her husband's affinity for feminine attire, and encourages him not only to dress like a woman, but to take on a woman's persona, as well. 'Why don't we call you Lili?' she suggests. What starts out as a harmless game soon evolves into something deeper, and potentially threatening to their marriage. Yet Greta's love proves to be enduring if not immutable. As Einar inexorably transforms, he steps beyond 'that small dark space between two people where a marriage exists' and Greta lets him go. Ebershoff does a remarkable job of historical prestidigitation, creating the sights and sounds and smells of 1930s Denmark and making it seem easy. Even more remarkable is his treatment of Greta: he gets inside her head and heart, and renders her in such loving detail that her reactions make perfect sense. Einar is more of a cipher, and ultimately less interesting than his wife. But in the end, this is Greta's book and David Ebershoff has done her proud. The Danish Girl marks a promising fictional debut. --Sheila Bright Related Items:      see moreAverage Rating:
 Rating:  - Breathtaking, surprising -- a magnificent accomplishmentI had read and loved The Rose City, and I picked up this novel knowing little about the subject matter. Ebershoff, who did such a brilliant job depicting the psychology of his protagonists in his short story collection, does a magnificent job revealing surprising characters and their unusual life stories. I think the word "breathtaking" is overused in blurbs and reviews, but that's a word I can't help but use to describe the sensation of losing myself in this narrative. A superb novel. Rating: - PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE...This is a stunning debut novel by someone who is no novice to the publishing industry, as he is the director of The Modern Library, which is a division of Random House. With this book as his entree into the ranks of novelist, Mr. Ebershoff rightly claims a place among the distinguished. This is a most elegantly written novel. His book is loosely based upon the true story of Danish painters, Einar Wegener and Gerda Waud. They met in Copenhagen, while they were both art students, and married a few years later. He painted landscapes, while she would become known for her paintings of a mysterious sloe-eyed beauty. When it eventually became known that the model for the mysterious beauty in Gerda's paintings was, in fact, her cross-dressing husband, they became the scandal of Copenhagen. They left Denmark and sought refuge in Paris, France, where the mystery woman of Gerda's paintings began appearing in the flesh among the denizens of the Parisian demi-monde. There is little doubt that Gerda encouraged her husband in his cross-dressing, as well as in his eventual surgical transformation. In 1930, the couple again turned the world on its head when it became known that Einar Wegener had undergone the world's first known sex re-assignment operation in Germany, and emerged as Lili Elbe. This provoked the King of Denmark himself to annul their marriage. Unfortunately, Lili Elbe's life as a surgically transformed woman ended in 1931 with her death. The author expertly weaves these facts, which were the inspiration for this novel, into a lyrically written, haunting narrative about two people who were bound to each other by an unconditional love that would transcend the conventional. He creates an intriguing, spellbinding story that is a sensitive portrait of a most unusual marriage. The author takes the reader on a journey into the imagined psyche of these two individuals, as their marriage slowly devolves and Lili becomes more and more prominent in their lives. The author leads the reader through Lili's gradual metamorphosis, her poignant self-realization, and the final denouement of the marriage. This is an exquisitely crafted novel by a very gifted writer. Bravo! Rating: - PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE...This is a stunning debut novel by someone who is no novice to the publishing industry, as he is the director of The Modern Library, which is a division of Random House. With this book as his entree into the ranks of novelist, Mr. Ebershoff rightly claims a place among the distinguished. This is a most elegantly written novel. His book is loosely based upon the true story of Danish painters, Einar Wegener and Gerda Waud. They met in Copenhagen, while they were both art students, and married a few years later. He painted landscapes, while she would become known for her paintings of a mysterious sloe-eyed beauty. When it eventually became known that the model for the mysterious beauty in Gerda's paintings was, in fact, her cross-dressing husband, they became the scandal of Copenhagen. They left Denmark and sought refuge in Paris, France, where the mystery woman of Gerda's paintings began appearing in the flesh among the denizens of the Parisian demi-monde. There is little doubt that Gerda encouraged her husband in his cross-dressing, as well as in his eventual surgical transformation. In 1930, the couple again turned the world on its head when it became known that Einar Wegener had undergone the world's first known sex re-assignment operation in Germany, and emerged as Lili Elbe. This provoked the King of Denmark himself to annul their marriage. Unfortunately, Lili Elbe's life as a surgically transformed woman ended in 1931 with her death. The author expertly weaves these facts, which were the inspiration for this novel, into a lyrically written, haunting narrative about two people who were bound to each other by an unconditional love that would transcend the conventional. He creates an intriguing, spellbinding story that is a sensitive portrait of a most unusual marriage. The author takes the reader on a journey into the imagined psyche of these two individuals, as their marriage slowly devolves and Lili becomes more and more prominent in their lives. The author leads the reader through Lili's gradual metamorphosis, her poignant self-realization, and the final denouement of the marriage. This is an exquisitely crafted novel by a very gifted writer. Bravo! Rating: - A glacially exquisite tale of a curious loveDavid Ebershoff's debut novel "The Danish Girl" is a glacially exquisite piece of work that takes as its subject the true story of the world's first transexual but is in essence a story about love, the strangeness of love. Ebershoff's perspective of Greta's and Einar's/Lili's relationship is coolly cerebral and unsentimental. Even the strange bleeding phenomenon that visits Einar/Lili is treated in the most clear-eyed and unsensational way. Unafraid to explore the subterranean realms of human consciousness, his dare and genius is to make us believe the impossible, that love can transcend the inversion of a normal conjugal relationship. Which wife would ask her husband to slip into a woman's shoes if only for a pose ......unless she senses - albeit subconsciously - something essentially female about his inner self ? Right through the early stages of Einar's transformation into Lili, it almost seems like Greta is coaxing Lili out of Einar's closet without a thought for the implications of their relationship. With Lili out in the open, Einar's personality withdraws, grows indistinct and then disappears. Only when Lili finally emerges and falls in love does Greta recognise that the Einar/Greta relationship has unalterably ended. Ebershoff's curious tale of an unusual love is genuinely heartwarming and never less than absorbing. It is also relentlessly sad and true. A beautifully written novel. Rating: - A solid page turner.Ebershoff's moving «The Danish Girl» is a rare find, a book you cannot put down and that holds your interest right to the end. Ebershoff presents his main characters in layers, carefully peeling away their exteriors to reveal their inner motivations and conflicts. The author takes an actual event and fleshes it out with characters who represent the various challenges facing Einar Wegener, a Danish painter who, though born a man, wants to be a woman. He is abetted in this quest by his wife, the American born Greta Waud. Greta is a unique character, and her singularity plays into her acceptance--and encouragement--of her husband's desire. This is as much her book as it is Einar's. Ebershoff's strength comes from his avoidance of the sensational or grotesque; it's a pleasure to read a novel on such a subject void of any heavy-handed manipualtion or sensationalism. An excellent book of rare feeling that poses lingering questions about identity. |
Three of them date from the '20s and '30s and were produced by Samuel Goldwyn. The 1926 silent The Winning of Barbara Worth gave Western stunt man and bit player Cooper his first featured role (by accident--the actor originally cast didn't report for work!). A cowboy whose visionary surveyor father aims to "redeem the desert and make it one fine garden," Cooper's character is the third corner of a romantic triangle, ordained by the Hollywood caste system to lose lifelong sweetheart Vilma Banky to engineer Ronald Colman. Colman has lots more screen time than Cooper and bears the moral-ethical brunt of the eco-conscious drama; he's also surprisingly persuasive wearing a sweat-stained Stetson and trading gunshots with the bad guys (if this were a sound film, Colman could never have gotten away with it). But the camera and the audience are locked onto Cooper whenever he's on screen. In longshot or vulnerable closeup, he's already one of the gods of the cinema. As for the movie, the quality of the print is excellent, its clarity intensified by bronze, yellow, and moonlit-blue tinting that often seems on the verge of resolving into full color. Director Henry King shows a good eye for action and bold vistas, and a visual adventurousness mostly absent from his later work.
Next up chronologically is The Cowboy and the Lady (1938), and the best thing about this misbegotten movie is Garson Kanin's description, in one of his Hollywood memoirs, of how Leo McCarey sold the idea for it to Sam Goldwyn. McCarey was, of course, a comedic master (recently Oscared for directing The Awful Truth), and his exuberant pitch convinced Goldwyn and his staffers that audiences would "piss" themselves laughing at this romantic comedy about a daughter of privilege (Merle Oberon) who falls for a rodeo rider (Cooper) and learns homespun values. Goldwyn paid McCarey off, assigned some writers to the script, then realized there was no real story--"no there there," as Gertrude Stein might have put it. The resultant unfunny and unromantic endeavor oozes bad faith from every pore, with neck-snapping life changes foisted on the hapless Cooper and Oberon from reel to reel, and excruciating scenes (jitterbugging in a drawing room, playing house back on Cooper's ranch) that strain charmlessly for McCarey's patented brand of fey. H.C. Potter directed, understandably without conviction.
We and Cooper are back on track with The Real Glory (1939). The reliable Henry Hathaway helmed this second cousin to his and Cooper's The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, with Cooper as an Army doctor assigned to the Philippine Constabulary on Mindanao in 1906. The movie was well-received when it came out; encountered in the shadow of the Iraq War, its tale of U.S. occupiers trying to help the local populace "stand up" against a fanatical and murderous insurgency takes on new fascination. There are some amazing passages--two horrendous murders by bolo knife--and the final battle sequence puts the CGI-riddled action films of the present day to shame. But the most impressive element is Cooper, and we can't improve on the verdict of that astute film critic Graham Greene: "Mr. Cooper ... has never acted better.... Watch him inoculate [Andrea King] against cholera--the casual jab of the needle, and the dressing slapped on while he talks, as though a thousand arms had taught him where to stab and he doesn't have to think any more."
For the final film in the set we jump into the '50s--the century's and Cooper's. Vera Cruz (1954) casts him as a former Confederate officer who's ridden into Emperor Maximilian's Mexico, hoping to make a fortune in the new civil war south of the border so that he can rebuild his own devastated homeland. Costar Burt Lancaster (whose company Hecht-Lancaster was producing) plays another mercenary, a real sociopath, and it's fascinating to watch these two stellar icons of very different Hollywood eras make common cause--Lancaster at the height of his grinning-predator mode, Cooper an aging knight whose aim is still true. Director Robert Aldrich keeps finding dynamic uses for the SuperScope format and flavorfully fills it with sublime uglies like Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, Charles Horvath, Jack Lambert, and Charles Buchinsky-about-to-become-Bronson. Pieces of this movie found their way into the dreams of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. --Richard T. Jameson
