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3 internautes sur 3 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5
A different view., Nov. 30 2001
A book is a machine to generate interpretations, as Eco wrote. Thus, not one interpretation can be the correct one, and all we can do is to add to what other people have experienced at some point while reading a book.Due to my own life experience, I perceive, perhaps, several more levels to this novel. The first time I read it, about 20 years ago, I was 10 and didn't understand many of the subtleties. However, the fact that the main character was so out of touch with the reality around him and that he had failed miserably to adapt to his changing surroundings, and, in the end, finds a "way out" for all the wrong reasons, made me think. And think hard. This book forced me to re-examine my own motivations several years later, because, besides the humour (sometimes even mockery) of our current socio-political systems, the book has a point. Bron Helmstron, the main character, becomes a woman not because he feels he's one, but because he wants to please the image of women she had as a man. He becomes a woman created from an intellectual male psyche. Of course the issue of gender is at the core of the novel. Adaptation, sexism (Bron is perhaps the last old-mindset sexist in this heterotopic future) and monosexism -that is, the loving yourself as a projection but in a different gender role. I asked myself many questions after re-reading this book at 22 (I'm a male-to-female transsexual): what are my motivations? I'm doing this as a rebellion against the rigidity of gender in our society? Am I doing this because I'm so selfish I've fallen in love with my own image in a different gender-role? Am I doing this out of selfishness, or because I've failed adapting myself to the world? Or because I'm so utterly sexist that, by adhering to the stereotype of what femineity should be, I am trying to put order to my own world? This is one of my "top ten" books of all times. It made me grow as a person, and discover in myself that, unlike Bron, I was going through this route because I wanted to be honest with myself, not out of selfishness or emotional laziness. Highly recommended if you don't mind some pretentiousness and have an open mind -and some background on feminist theory wouldn't hurt.
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