French Books

Story of the Eye

Georges Bataille

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Grotesque and Astonishing 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

George Bataille's brief Sade-esque novella is a mordantly brilliant dip into the post-Nietzschen world modernity. The Story of the Eye is a pornographic disintegration of the Western ethical code. It is both magnificent and foul; a more daring and original work than his later philosophy/anthropology. A seminal piece of 20th century literature; although it was published well before the cultural abominations of our current nihilism, we are still not ready for this bleak and punkish work of literary debauchery.

Haunting Endeavor Plunging Across Literary Boundaries (featuring medicore storytelling) 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Well, chances are probably good that if you're reading this then you've heard of the classic erotic Story of the Eye. It's sheer outrageous absurdity in the form of sensation overload. Pornographic endeavors of the most grotesque, extraordinary, and perverse leads the narrative (i. e. bulls and eggs) and drives the main themes straight to the point. Mr. Bataille's work is mostly driven on his philosophy that, like de Sade, focuses on violence, death, isolation, irrationality versus rationality (the will to life of Schoepenhauer, and the spirit of Nietzsche) and of course passion (through sex and desire). At times the book was arousing, at times disgusting, but inevitably the story becomes so numbing that I lost sense of my own human characteristics. If that sounds like a stretch to you, read the book and see what you think. This book is a shocker that disables social and literary boundaries, though the form of the book (13(?) chapters, linear narrative) is only clouded over by some poor narration. For fans of Henry Miller, Marquis de Sade, Anais Nin's erotica, and the Story of O, check this out, but be weary that this book is more meta than you might care for.

Editorial Review:

novel, tr Joachim Neugroschel

Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings

Marquis De Sade

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

obsession 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

After having seen the film "Quivers" about de Sade with Geoffrey Rush, I was intrigued and wanted to learn more about the writer by reading his writing. The guy is obsessed with sodomy--it gets tiresome. His writing, though intelligently presented, is eclipsed by his incredibly juvenile and obsessive sensibilities. Not a favourite tome.

Good one 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

He is a freak and that is why I like his writing.
What a life this guy led.

fast shipping, great condition 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I received the item fast, the book is in great condition. Exactly what I needed as I ordered the book for a seminar. I haven't read it yet but will soon.

Advanced Reading 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

The Marquis is deep, complex, simple, intelligent and in your face. Outside of "Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man" however, his work is definately hard to get into. For lack of a better term, this is advanced reading, but it's worth it.

Editorial Review:

This volume contains Philosophy in the Bedroom, a major novel that presents the clearest summation of his political philosophy; Eugénie de Franval, a novella widely considered to be a masterpiece of eighteenth-century French literature; and the only authentic and complete American edition of his most famous work, Justine.

The Garden of Eden (Unabridged)

Ernest Hemingway

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 84 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Strange and oddly mesmerising 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is a very strange novel that I found oddly mesmerising. I also have to admit, that because the novel was published posthumously and appears to have been based on Hemmingway's most intimate personal experiences, I felt a little uncomfortable reading it - as if I were a voyeur.

Garden of Eden is about the complex dysfunctional relationship that develops between a young married couple and a second woman, whom they both fall in love with. It is Catherine, the young bride, who manipulates the other two players in this strange romantic triangle. David, presumably Ernest's alter ego in this novel, is portrayed as pathetically passive, unable to stand up to Catherine and her destructive obsessions and jealousies.

The dynamics of this relationship are sophisticated, although much of the dialogue and routines of the threesome seem banal. The Garden of Eden is interesting also; in that it gives the reader some insight into Hemmingway's writing process. David a young writer has published two successful novels and is labouring on a collection of stories about his childhood in Africa. It is David's writing, and the fact that his lover is able to share the experience with him, that Catherine is most jealous of.

Comparisons to The Sun Also Rises are inevitable. Catherine, like Brett in The Sun Also Rises, is the self-destructive heart of Garden of Eden. Both novels feature characters whose lives seem trite and empty, filled with the excess of drink and food. And both novels feature a young writer, struggling to find his literary voice while drawn to a narcissistic beauty.

While the novel isn't sexually explicit by today's standard, some readers will be uncomfortable with the nature of the relationship in this novel and with the `gender bending games' Catherine insists the young couple play.

The novel has its shortcomings and won't be appreciated by all. It may seem tedious and trite to some, a posthumously published, uneven effort that should have stayed off the book shelves, but I found it unexpectedly sophisticated and oddly mesmerizing. Garden of Eden is a far cry from Hemmingway's best work (For Whom the Bell Tolls is my personal favourite), but I found it worth reading (3 ¾ stars).

Editorial Review:

A sensational bestseller when it appeared in 1986, The Garden of Eden is the last uncompleted novel of Ernest Hemingway, which he worked on intermittently from 1946 until his death in 1961. Set on the Côte d'Azur in the 1920s, it is the story of a young American writer, David Bourne, his glamorous wife, Catherine, and the dangerous, erotic game they play when they fall in love with the same woman. "A lean, sensuous narrative...taut, chic, and strangely contemporary," The Garden of Eden represents vintage Hemingway, the master "doing what nobody did better" (R. Z. Sheppard, Time).

The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

Marquis De Sade

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Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit that has yet existed," wrote The 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration-a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud-of the psychology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935.
In addition to The 120 Days, this volume includes Sade's "Reflections on the Novel," his play Oxtiem, and his novella Ernestine. The selections are introduced by Simone de Beauvoir's landmark essay "Must We Burn Sade?" and Pierre Klossowski's provocative "Nature as Destructive Principle." "Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."-From Sade's Last Will and Testament

Story of O

Guido Crepax

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Not for everyone... 4 out of 5 stars.
45 of 45 people found this review helpful.

The Story of O is about a young, beautiful Parisian photographer named O who wants nothing more than to be her lover's slave. She goes through strict "training" for two weeks at Roissey, a club where other women like her learn how to "obey" their masters in whatever they order them to do, whether it be for their masters alone or for other members of the club. O goes through harsh punishments, such as being whipped and flogged daily and being chained to her bed every night. What is most disturbing about this first part of the book, is not O's harsh punishments that she endures, but the fact that she endures all this debasement willingly.

Though she may be considered as a masochist at the beginning of the novel, it becomes clear while reading through the rest of the novel that this is not the case. This is not so much a story about masochism, as it is more a story about love, about how much a woman would sacrifice for it, and the length a woman will go to keep her lover, Rene, happy. O derives no pleasure from the physical, emotional, and psychological torture she endures. Rather, her pleasure is derived from the aftermath of those things: the lashes to her skin, the debasement and objectification of her body and the cruelty that she willingly chooses to endure makes O "happy" in the fact that she is doing all this to please her lover.

O is not a prisoner or slave in the normal term of the word, but rather she is a slave to her love for Rene, as he has made it clear to her that she is free to leave anytime she desires. But she is blinded by her love for him and feels that by enduring the punishment he puts her through, she is becoming closer to him. Or rather, she is becoming his, his object, his property. O cannot stand the thought of losing him or of being separated from him and she feels that her submission to him proves to him that she is his and only his and he can do whatever he wants with her so long as he dos not leave her:

"O was happy that Rene had had her whipped and had prostituted her, because her impassioned submission would furnish her lover with the proof that she belonged to him, but also because the pain and shame of the lash, and the outrage inflicted upon her by those who compelled to her pleasure when they took her, and at the same time delighted in their own without paying the slightest heed to hers, seemed to her the very redemption of her sins."

I saw O, at times, when in the presence of her "masters" as very naive, bordering on the edge of foolish, but cannot help but feel that she deliberately acted this way to seem all the more submissive to them. The only time I ever see O, the real person and not as an object, was when she was with her lover Jacqueline. But I found it odd that O took on many of Rene's domineering characteristics while with Jacqueline, wanting to be in control of Jacqueline intimately, wanting to control her body the way Rene controlled O's. It was only when Jacqueline saw O's body, the marks of the flogging and her scars, that Jacqueline began to back away from O and O had "felt insulted at seeing Jacqueline's contempt for her condition as a flogged and branded slave, a condition of which O herself was proud".

This novel is definitely not for everyone. In fact, it's not for a lot of people due to the neverending violence. I have heard many people call this book "erotic" but it was nothing like that for me. The only reason I kept reading was because I was more intrigued by O. I wanted to understand her, but I think at the end, I was only more confused by her and her mindset. I began thinking toward the end of the novel that she was nothing more than a [...], which ironically, is just what O wanted people to think of her. I also began to greatly dislike her, whereas at the beginning of the novel I was indifferent to her. The ending of this book also left me with a feeling of emptiness as I still had more questions that will forever be unanswered.

What probably disturbed me most about this book, though, was surprisingly not the torture that O endured. If she had been unwilling, it would have caused me to sympathize for her but because she was a willing partner in it, I could not seem to find any kind of sympathy for her, except for at the very end which I will not give away here. That, in itself, disturbed me but what also disturbed me was the fact that I saw in O many characteristics that I have seen in a lot of women today: her willingness to please her lover, to go to drastic lengths to make her lover happy, and her blind passion for him.

Editorial Review:

O is a young, beautiful fashion photographer in Paris. One day her lover, Rene, takes her to a chateau, where she is enslaved, with Rene's approval, and systematically sexually assaulted by various other men. Later, Rene turns O over to Sir Stephen, an English friend who intensifies the brutality. But the final humiliation is yet to come.

A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel

James Salter

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Objectification as Art 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Salter has an incredible sensuous style, so I'm giving this three stars because I just like how he puts the words together on the page. But for me this books feels utterly dated. It was apparently written in the 1960's and it shows -- disaffected American (Dean) hangs out in France, has lots of erotic yet completely emotionally unfulfilling sex. No one communicates very deeply with anyone, nothing seems to have a point and of course it all ends badly. I suspect it seems much more meaningful if you are a certain sex (not mine) and beyond a certain age.

The sex (did I mention there's lots of it?) is vividly described yet weirdly depressing. Why? Maybe it's because I'm a woman and the woman in this story is treated as an absolute object. There is no real effort made to get into her head, and she appears to exist solely to be a docile receptacle for Dean's sperm. For all the emotional involvement our hero feels for her, he might as well have just bought an inflatable doll. So yeah, I find that kind of depressing.

Editorial Review:

“As nearly perfect as any American fiction I know,” is how Reynolds Price (The New York Times) described this classic that has been a favorite of readers, both here and in Europe, for almost forty years. Set in provincial France in the 1960s, it is the intensely carnal story—part shocking reality, part feverish dream —of a love affair between a footloose Yale dropout and a young French girl. There is the seen and the unseen—and pages that burn with a rare intensity.

The Torture Garden

Octave Mirbeau; Alvah C. Bessie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Scathing view of humanity and its coarse, ignorant brutality 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The story opens with a select group of elitist swine sitting down to a fancy supper. Many banal topics of conversation are broached with levity and mocking sarcasm, until the topic of murder comes up. Specifically, murder as an innate biological human need, much like procreation. I liked where this book was heading...

Our protagonist fancies himself a most vile and debauched jack-of-all-trades; actually, he is more of an impostor of all trades, and liar extraordinaire. However, while on a steam ship, en route to his next great scheme, he meets his match in Clara. A deep love blossoms between them, and our protagonist's heart, weakened by her purity and chastity, falls prey to her charms. But Clara is not as she appears, the chaste little cherry blossom, no, no, Clara can be likened to a great degree to Venus, in Masoch's Venus in Furs. So, mad, stricken with love, our protagonist confesses the sins of his life to Clara, and she comforts him, assuring him that his confession has not diminished her love for him. Subsequently, she, with the skill of a serpent, leads him astray into her world, a world where he will not only question the depth and breadth of his own depravity but his sanity as well. For Clara's soul is as black and consuming as a tar pit.

Political intrigue and hypocrisy abound, not to mention the ever-prevalent scathing view of humanity and its coarse, ignorant brutality, motivated by dogma and prejudice. And then there is the Garden...inspired by the ethereal beauty, our protagonist at this point in the story becomes quite poetic. The words are rich and romantic, and they mirror the duality of the story - the duality of mankind - the heavenly garden juxtaposed against an artistic milieu of horrific torture. Why is it that we cannot see the beauty of the world until we are stripped naked, face down at the bottom of the abyss with our heads shoved in our own bile? Maybe this story will shed some light.

As I mentioned, this is not the best presentation of the work, but, if you can get past the frustration of formatting issues and endless typos and grammatical errors, this is a story not to be missed, simply for its profound view on the brutal nature of humanity. Warning - the torture depicted in this book is quite gruesome, by 1899 standards anyway. Today's Saw and Hostel hack-and-slash movie generation will more than likely find it rather mild.

Hot in the City - French Quarter (Ellora's Cave Presents, Hot in the City)

Lacey Alexander

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Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Talk about HOT and STEAMY 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Wow, this is a must read book if you want hot and steamy. I love the spontaneous sex they have in the strip club and in some courtyard. The story is great, the man sounds so yummy. Wish I could meet someone like this. Lacey does an awesome job on this book. You won't want to put the book down.

French Quarter 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Liz marsh had a major confidence problem only compounded by her intuition that her fiancé was cheating on her. She had always felt she was plain and unremarkable, so when Todd proposed, she thought she was very lucky. They were supposed to be married soon, and she had to find out for sure if he was a cheat, so her friend Lynda recommended a PI named Jack Wade to investigate for her. When she met Jack, she was not prepared for how incredibly sexy he would be. He oozed testosterone and dominance, but his dark eyes were what drew her to him. Jack didn't normally accept cheating spouse cases anymore, but he was instantly attracted to Liz, and decided to make an exception.

It didn't take Jack long to discover where Todd was spending his free time. He was a regular at a local strip club called Club Venus. Jack took some photographic evidence, but as he assumed, Liz wanted to see Todd in action for herself. Liz didn't know what to expect when she arrived with Jack, but was surprised to find she couldn't take her eyes off all the beautiful girls. She admired their freedom, and confidence. Jack couldn't believe Liz's response. He expected her to be disgusted by the activity at Club Venus, but instead she was succumbing to the erotic stimuli. He had never wanted a woman more at that moment, and when they spotted Todd so she could get her confirmation, he hurried her out. Jack wanted to get Liz alone, and more importantly naked. They both wanted to rip each others clothes off, and only made it as far as the alley way a couple of blocks away before lust took over their senses. Liz was falling for the man that had unleashed her wild side.

Todd did not handle the break up well; in fact he said he would never let Liz go. She felt he would calm down, and then things would be okay. After being with Jack, she now realized she never really loved Todd, but was fulfilling other peoples expectations of her. When Todd began terrorizing Liz, and threatening Jack's life, she didn't know what to do. He told her if Jack found out about his threats, he would be killed. Her only choice was to distance herself from everyone she cared about to protect them because she had no one now that could help her.

What a hot erotic journey Liz and Jack take you on. This story is not for the faint of heart as it is very explicit. Liz has no sense of self worth until she meets Jack, and he gives her the encouragement to be herself. She in turn helps him heal a broken heart left by his mother many years ago. Good suspenseful story that will keep you hooked until the end!

Editorial Review:

When Liz Marsh hires P.I. Jack Wade to find out if her fiancé is cheating on her, she has no idea she's about to embark upon a sexual odyssey through New Orleans' steamy French Quarter. Raised to be a prim, conservative woman, it takes Jack's sizzling sexuality to make Liz shed her old self and release the secret woman inside her, a woman who seeks every sensual adventure she can find. With Jack on her arm and the decadence of Bourbon Street beckoning, Liz's sexual daring knows no bounds.

The Art of Love (Modern Library Classics)

Ovid

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Brilliant and witty 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 13 people found this review helpful.

I read the Duane Humphries translation. His preface is superbly written, so one would hope that his translation possesses similar flair. Since I don't read Latin, I cannot attest to his accuracy.

He observes in his preface the commonalities between Ovid's scene and that of our contemporary world. You will get a strong sense of a society that was very similar to that of our own.

If you want some action! 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 16 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the best books that i have read on "love".Intellectual eroticism always gives a sophisticated veneer to less lofty primordial sexual impulses.Throws new light on the Roman decadence and hedonistic society.So if you want to take a journey and delve into the very essense of Ovid's eroticism and human sexuality or just learn to show some 'love' read this book.

Editorial Review:

In the first century a.d., Ovid, author of the groundbreaking epic poem Metamorphoses, came under severe criticism for The Art of Love, which playfully instructed women in the art of seduction and men in the skills essential for mastering the art of romantic conquest. In this remarkable translation, James Michie breathes new life into the notorious Roman’s mock-didactic elegy. In lyrical, irreverent English, he reveals love’s timeless dilemmas and Ovid’s enduring brilliance as both poet and cultural critic.

Juliette

Marquis de Sade

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Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Evil never sounded so good... 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

1200 pages. Its been said that actually reading Sade from cover to cover like you would an `ordinary' novel is a test of one's mental and even physical endurance. The seeming endless catalog of escalating violence and perversion in a series of episodes so outrageously obscene they begin to border on the comic, so obsessively repetitious they become mind-numbing is said to make *Juliette* virtually unreadable. It took me two-and-a-half weeks to finish this marathon of horrors and Im delighted to report it wasn't nearly as grueling as advertised.

What often goes unremarked is that Sade is a surprisingly funny writer. Yes, funny. It's hard not to miss the hyperbolic parody of much of *Juliette,* although many do, especially those who haven't read Sade in his entirety or in context. The prudish, those easily offended, they'll have a hard time finding anything to laugh about here, too. Sade is a literary shock-jock. But what's also surprising is how many of Sade's social positions are not only quintessentially "enlightened," but serve as the very foundation of a considerable amount of "liberal" thought. Sade is pro-choice, against capital punishment, a champion of homosexuality, free love, and feminism, a fierce enemy of monarchy and the Church and all forms of fundamentalism--he envisions a society of liberated men and women pursuing their individual happiness outside the moral censure of both the majority and the minority. Sade could, in fact, be considered the grandpappy of our me-first, me-only age.

Of course, Sade carries his radical position of extreme personal freedom to its logical end--in rape, theft, and murder. And, perhaps, the most overlooked aspect of Sade is that his philosophy of mayhem is the "logical" end of personal freedom, its ultimate justification.

Far from advancing his ideas in the manner of a raving lunatic as he's often portrayed, Sade does so with cold, exacting, rational arguments. At times, *Juliette* reads like a satanic version of Plato's dialogues. But whereas Plato based Western civilization on his rational "proof" that reason is synonymous with good, Sade does the exact opposite, using rational deduction to prove that reason is synonymous with evil. What lends Sade's argument its shattering power is that whereas behind Plato's there's always the ghost of an a priori teleological principle of dubious and ultimately unprovable existence, Sade bases his conclusions on the indisputable facts of observable nature--a nature, he's always quick to point out, that is red in tooth and claw. Grounding his dialectic in every creature's natural self-interest, he can never be proved wrong in thinking the "worst" of man. For everything, even pity, generosity, love, and self-sacrifice can be seen as self-interest. The only thing that checks our instinctive and insatiable appetites are fear, superstition, social-conditioning, oppression, and stupidity. And it's the rulers, priests, and rich who make certain the rest of us remain in the dark, a.k.a. living "morally," while they, shielded by their wealth, power, and hypocrisy feed off the rest of us poor fools.

Taking a look at history, at the world today, it's hard to argue. Indeed, it seems a fact: we live in a Sadeian universe and convince ourselves we don't with the comforting lullabies of religion, social and political idealisms, and fuzzy fellow feeling. We want to believe that reason is synonymous with good, truth with beauty, but the key word is "believe." We want to believe it because the alternative, with exaggeration for effect, is the harsh world Sade reveals to us in *Juliette.*

What makes Sade so revolutionary is not only that he writes scenes of sexual violence that can still shock, disgust, and outrage contemporary sensibilities--I refer the reader in particular to Juliette's sexcapades with the Pope!--but that by proving that reason can be used just as easily, if not more effectively, to justify evil as it originally was used to justify good, Sade stood all of western morality on its head. Reading through the extensive philosophical speculations connecting all the dirty parts of *Juliette,* the reader recognizes the ideas of many of the most prominent thinkers and writers of the next two centuries already prefigured. There's a reason that Sade has been one of the seminal figures for generations of our most prominent philosophers and authors--his sordid outpourings of blood and semen have directly or indirectly fertilized minds with the seeds of that tree upon which grows the most forbidden fruit of all.

One of those rare books that truly has the power to shake your most firmly held beliefs and even change your life, *Juliette*is the Bible of Evil, probably never to be equaled, certainly impossible to surpass. I don't think it an exaggeration to say that no reader of intelligence and culture should die without reading this book.

Editorial Review:

“An amazing sequence of imaginatively bizarre sexual adventures punctuated by philosophical and theological digression. Mlle. De Maupin, Lolita, Candy—all pale beside Juliette.”—Library Journal