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Books about identity

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre gives you a heroine with no money and no beauty who insists on her own worth anyway, and Frances Cha's Αν είχα το πρόσωπό σου sets three young women in Seoul's room salons against the price of beauty and money. What these books share is a close, first-person attention to how a person holds onto a self while the world tells her what she should be.

A page that shows it

Πώς έμοιαζε ο κόσμος όταν το ίντερνετ ήταν ακόμη κατοικίδιο.

Τότε που οι άνθρωποι διάβαζαν ακόμη έντυπα, τότε που όλοι νοιάζονταν για τη γνώμη μου. Είχα έρθει στη Νέα Υόρκη στα τέλη της δεκαετίας του ’90, στην ύστατη πνοή των ένδοξων ημερών, μόνο που τότε κανείς δεν είχε ιδέα. Η Νέα Υόρκη ήταν τίγκα στους γραφιάδες, κανονικούς γραφιάδες, γιατί τότε υπήρχαν περιοδικά, κανονικά περιοδικά, πολλά περιοδικά. Ήταν η εποχή που το ίντερνετ το φύλαγαν ακόμη στην άκρη του εκδοτικού κόσμου σαν κάποιο εξωτικό ζώο – του πετούσαν λίγες κροκέτες, το κρατούσαν από το λουρί και το κοίταζαν όπως χόρευε, αχ, τι χαριτωμένο, σίγουρα δεν θα μας σκοτώσει το βράδυ που θα κοιμόμαστε. Σκεφτείτε το: Μια εποχή που πιτσιρικάδες οι οποίοι μόλις είχαν τελειώσει το πανεπιστήμιο έρχονταν στη Νέα Υόρκη και πληρώνονταν για να γράφουν.
Excerpt from Το κορίτσι που εξαφανίστηκε, Gillian Flynn, Μεταίχμιο 2012. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals

  3. Jane Eyre

    Charlotte Brontë, 1847

    An orphan with no money, no beauty and a ferocious sense of her own worth takes a job at a strange house. A first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct.

  13. Ulysses

    James Joyce, 1922

    One Dublin day in 1904, followed through two men's minds — an ad-canvasser and a young writer — with every joke, smell and stray thought left in.

  16. Educated

    Tara Westover, 2018

    A girl grows up without school or doctors on an Idaho mountain, then teaches herself enough to leave—and has to decide what leaving costs.

  17. Divergent

    Veronica Roth, 2011

    A girl raised to put others first joins the faction that prizes bravery, and learns how much of herself she is willing to risk.

  21. Middlemarch

    George Eliot, 1872

    A provincial town, a clever woman married to the wrong scholar, an ambitious doctor, and the slow, comic, devastating work of learning that other people are real.

  22. Σαίξπηρ

    Harold Bloom, 1998

    Harold Bloom's case for Shakespeare as the inventor of the self-aware character: a lifetime of reading distilled into an argument about how fictional people learned to change.

  23. Ἡ Τρίχα

    Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 1830

    Ο εθνικός ποιητής γράφει σάτιρα: ένας ζυγιαστής ζυγίζει ανθρώπους, πουλιά και πολιτικούς, κι ένα ποίημα βγαίνει από ένα όνειρο και μια τρίχα.

A taste of the feed

  1. What it feels like to envy your own portrait.

    “I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!” The hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying.

    The Picture of Dorian Gray · Oscar Wilde

  2. Looking at someone you shouldn't, knowing precisely what it will cost.

    No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn involuntarily to his face; I could not keep their lids under control: they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.

    Jane Eyre · Charlotte Brontë

  3. The story a friend tells you about yourself, and the one you know is truer.

    Η Σούτζιν με αποκαλεί χαϊδευτικά ινόκουντζου, ή «μικρή γοργόνα». Λέει ότι διάλεξε αυτό το όνομα επειδή η μικρή γοργόνα έχασε τη φωνή της, αλλά την ξαναβρήκε αργότερα και έζησε ευτυχισμένη. Δεν της λέω ότι αυτή είναι η αμερικανική εκδοχή του παραμυθιού. Στην αυθεντική ιστορία αυτοκτονεί.

    Αν είχα το πρόσωπό σου · Frances Cha

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