Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #124019 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

The Mind-Body Problem 1983
Plot Kernel: A female graduate student of philosophy at Princeton, of Jewish heritage but not practicing Judaism since adulthood, now dedicated to an intellectual, self-examined life but out of step with the viewpoint and reigning methods of analytic philosophy and thus of middling achievement within the department, meets and marries a mathematical genius of the highest order, himself of Jewish biological heritage but with no past or present relation to Judaism. This woman finds her identity and value through her public association via marriage with this man of Olympian rank among intellectuals. He is the fully rational man, dedicated to logic, the a priori and pure mathematics; she is the philosophical female struggling emotionally and intellectually with the question of mind's relation to body, and body's place in the life of the mind. Her religious past and her parents' dedication to Judaism are ever present commentaries upon her life and her musings about where the value and meaning of one's life arises or resides.

The narrative is written as an introspective meditation on the lead character's past, not as a script-like text of prolonged dialogue with short simple descriptive passages between.

"And where was I now? I had hoped, like the good fairy tale taught, to save myself by marrying Noam. My mattering to him, who himself mattered so much, was going to do the trick. It had always been a battle against self-hate, and that's a bloody battle. I certainly didn't have the stuff to stand up to Noam's attacks, his palpable contempt. If I have quaked before every idiot's judgment, if the shrug of the shoulders has always been a movement I'm incapable of executing, imagine how it was to be standing before the Highest Judge, the Genius, before whom no invalid inference could be hidden, and to hear the verdict delivered: You are damned, you are dumb." (191)

Too Jewish
Poor genius and poorer philosopher. Just another Romance with a mishmash of some philosophy thrown in

What's So Funny?
Some readers of Rebecca Goldstein's THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM will find it "a very funny novel" (NEWSWEEK) or "clever and funny" (THE NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS). Perhaps. While there is a scintilla of humor in this brain-teaser of a novel, the risible may, whether it is a mother's misogyny, a husband's egomania, unrequitted love, the perseverance of ancient tribal rites, the dilemma of marriage v. career or historic atrocity, grab you and as likely make you wince. Goldstein herself, with a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton and a MacArthur "genius award", lived out the writing of this first novel in more profound terms:

"To me the process is still mysterious. I had just come through a very emotional time, having not only become a mother but having also lost my father, whom I adored. In the course of grieving for my father and glorifying my daughter, I found that the very formal, very precise questions I had been trained to analyze weren't gripping me the way they once had. Suddenly, I was asking the most 'unprofessional' sorts of questions...such as how does all this philosophy I've studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life?...I wanted to confront such questions in my writing, and I wanted to confront them in a way that would insert 'real life' intimately into the intellectual struggle."

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM engagingly weaves the tortured choice out of Plato's cave, the tangled skein of Leibnitzian monadology (the novel's antagonist is a card-carrying Platonist and Fields Medal mathematician), Cartesian dualism (the novel's heroine is aptly named Renee) and Shroedinger's positivism (What, after all, is life?), into the bits and pieces of everyday perception, belied by its uncommonplace ivy-walled setting. But, not to worry, if you have never taken a course in philosophy. At one level or another, RASHOMON-like, you will probably find yourself and others you know in the novel's moving pace and surprising denouement. If you are ignorant of geometry, you may also enter, read, and enjoy.