{review} eat me

Linda Jaivin Eat Me (Text Classics: 2012 [1995])

This is a review for Kim at Reading Matters' Australian Literature Month.

Kim is donating 50p to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation for each review she receives for the month that links to her blog. The Indigenous Literacy Foundation "aims to raise literacy levels and improve the lives and opportunities of Indigenous children living in remote and isolated regions. This is done by providing books and literacy resources to communities and raising broad community awareness of Indigenous literacy issues." (source). This is an excellent cause and I have clicked over and made a donation which "will buy 3 or more books for an indigenous child living in a remote community."

But, the review... (and, incidentally, I do not think that this will be a book handed out to children unless something goes rather wrong in the distribution process.)

     

Text Classics offer new editions of Australian books, "milestones in the Australian experience". I picked Linda Jaivin's Eat Me, first published in 1995, because it seems to have totally missed my radar, and I suspect that was because I was living in the UK in the second half of the 90s. I imagine that I missed rather a lot of Australian writing in those poor student days. I also picked it because I like books that link food and sex in interesting ways. That said, I may never be able to look at grapes in quite the same way again.

It was a warm night. He was just wearing a t-shirt and jeans. He was probably in his fifties and, as he bent over the hood, I got a good look at him. I was still thinking along the lines of how I would describe him to the police.

Eat Me is a very funny collection of erotic stories with a distinctly Australian voice, setting and aesthetic. (Although fortunately not always as memorably antipodean as "sucking to the beat of 'Waltzing Matilda'.") Set mostly in Sydney (but with a wholly unforgettable scene set at the Big Merino), it ostensibly relates the tales told by four very modern women who meet up - café society! - and offer each other stories based, one is led to believe, on personal experience. But this easy narrative style soon begins to break down both for the women and for the reader, and by the end of this very well structured book one finds oneself (as do the narrators) somewhat at a loss about what is real and what is not. Can these stories even be real, one might (even) ask? 

This ambiguity begins to extend to Eat Me-the-book itself, trapping the reader in a very pleasant puzzle about what it is they are, in fact, reading: reading erotica about listening to erotica read by writers of erotica writing erotica from female and male perspectives... and so on!

Without further ado, he rolled on top and entered her. A zillion images flooded into his head: of marscapone, of Sharon Stone, of steaming cannelloni, of lingerie, of Elle Macpherson, of stallions, of stamens, of Mal Meninga on a run, of Madonna on a gondola, of cocker spaniels, Mick Jagger’s lips, of ET, of wet t-shirt contests, of mangos, of his father swinging a golf club, of a platypus wriggling its way down a muddy river. Much to his horror, Beavis and Butthead provided the soundtrack, laughing: hehheh hehheh hehheh.

This ambiguity is heightened, I thought, by Jaivin's use of a number of the stereotypes of erotic encounters: the mysterious sudden absence of all witnesses to very public sex acts; exaggerated, er [trying not to get myself blocked here!], manhood (shall we say?!); the ease of sexual conquest; an exaggerated brutality of genital language (love blender; goluptious trough); to name but a few. My assumption was that these features were deliberately signposting the fault-lines between reality and fantasy, that is, sexing up the intellectual calibre of erotic writing at the same it is implicitly undermined. 

As one loses one's footing in the narrative, tripped up by its multiple narrators (unreliable? fictional? female? male? quasi-autobiographical?!) with distinctly different perspectives, one starts to question the dynamics of the genre itself. Sex is never simple; it is intimately bound up with power, for one thing. Jaivin's playful female reworking of the norms gives one a lot to think about re the genre and one's expectations of the erotic ("I think it’s important to valorise safe sex practices even in fantasy").

Is this too pornographic? Are you shocked? I can’t really stop here, though, can I? Besides, if it’s pornographic, do you think it proves or disproves Robin Morgan’s thesis that if rape is the practice, pornography is the theory? What happens when we women write the pornography? Can we rape ourselves? I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately. The other day, Philippa shared one of her erotic stories with us and asked about the latest line on pornography. I’ve never quite understood the difference between erotica and pornography, have you? I mean, is erotica merely porn with literary pretensions? Or is something pornography if written by a man but erotica if penned by a woman?

(The narrator here is, one can perhaps guess, an academic!)

In sum: I would love to read some more of Jaivin's writing - she has a very witty and very Australian voice. Sexual fantasy is very personal, and there were elements of this book that almost certainly will not appeal to every reader (myself included; especially the grapes), but I did rather like how this book made me consider my own generic expectations and the underlying power dynamics of (predominantly) heterosexual erotica written for and/or by women. Have I, for instance, been carefully over-intellectualizing the risqué to render respectable my reading of erotica?! ;-)

Thanks to Kim for encouraging us all to read more Australian writers during Australian Literature Month. 

{review} lace

Shirley Conran Lace (1982)

    

Lili’s eyes did not glisten. They glared. They projected rage and fury. For a moment the star stood silent as she surveyed the four older women: Kate in her mulberry suit by the door; Pagan in pink, sprawled across the apricot cushions; Maxine poised, porcelain cup in one hand, the saucer held on her blue silk lap; Judy in brown velvet, on the edge of the sofa with shoulders hunched, hands under her chin, elbows on her knees, scowling right back at Lili. Then Lili spoke. “All right,” she said, “which one of you bitches is my mother?”

I didn't read Lace as a teenager, although - thanks to the public library - I did devour my fair share of bonkbusters by Judith Krantz (the unforgettable Princess Daisy, for instance; and if you haven't read Clive James' review of this in the LRB, you MUST MUST MUST!). 

When Lace was reissued I thought that this was my chance to recover a bit of my lost prurient teenaged years. And, in that sense, the reissue of Lace as an e-book is perfect, for no one can tell what you are reading. 

Yet, I don't think one should be too ashamed of adding it to one's reading list. As Desperate Reader has written in her fine review, Lace remains an important and relevant book for women. The dangers, prejudices and active discrimination that these women faced from the 1950s to 1980s still remain relevant, and Lace is a book that celebrates what women can achieve despite the odds. It also celebrates the power of female friendship and the value of female independence.

To bring you up to speed, five women dominate Lace. Four of them meet at finishing school in Switzerland: Maxine, who will become a French countess and chateau-restorer and fan of having couturier clothing torn from her elegant, nip-and-tucked body; Pagan ("wonderful mahogany hair"; Jean Muir leg o'mutton sleeves), impoverished aristocrat, "perplexed, hopeless drunkard", and charity fund-raiser; Kate, timid unlikely war correspondent who can make a single biscuit last two hours and drives a "silver Karmann Ghia"; Judy, poor country gal transformed into top New York PR queen with a fancy for purple Courrèges pantsuits (who really should have been a lesbian). The fifth woman, Lili, superstar actress, ex-porn star, wearer of Diorissimo and a sucker for/of buttered asparagus tips, is, as the most famous line of Lace suggests, the long-lost daughter of one of these women. The book does that jumping back and forward thing so characteristic of 70s/80s' bonkbuster 700 page epics, as we try to figure out who bore Lili and who the father might have been. 

Let me simply offer some choice passages to demonstrate what you've been missing. 

On sex:

Then he collapsed on top of her and Kate felt a stickiness trickling over her collarbone and down her neck. She knew what it was and she didn't dare move in case some of the stuff got in the wrong place. She was terrified.

*

Softly, insistently, Pierre again pulled her hand downward and clasped it over his flesh. Maxine decided to pretend that it wasn't her hand. She was terrified of doing something wrong, of hurting him. Did you bend it forward? Did you rotate it? Could it snap off?

*

…he was the Nijinsky of cunnilingus…

[this is the same bloke who likes to jazz up sexual shenanigans with a goldfish up the cooter.] 

* 

On fashion:

“That V neck doesn’t plunge as low as the one in the show,” Maxine criticised. “No, Monsieur Dior kindly agreed to a high neck. Before six-thirty and after forty-five one should never show an inch of skin.”

*

Maxine needed a great deal of underwear for a very private reason.

* 

The perils of alcohol:

Serge stormed into Senequier, drank a bottle of brandy, then drove wildly to Cap Camerat where he strangled the white cockatoo.

* 

Interior décor:

Opposite the window was a fifty-foot run of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lacquered Chinese red. Not all the shelves contained books; Kate's collection of antique snuff boxes stood on one; another held a small collection of terra-cotta ancient Greek votive statuettes and other shelves held small, charming objects—a seventeenth-century bronze of a man wrestling with a bull by Garnier, a tiny yellow Meissen patch-box that had once belonged to Madame de Pompadour.

* 

General good advice:

Judy said, “Real protection isn’t a man—it’s money! That’s what gives you the power to do good, the power to be bad, the power to stay or to leave.”

* 

So, Lace - go on… Yes, it's pretty awful. Also sordid. Ridiculous. Funny for many wrong reasons. Addictive. 

Where do I go from here…? I've also never read any Jilly Cooper. And I think I need a monogrammed crocodile jewellery case and a set of sables.

{review} in praise of older women

Stephen Vizinczey (1965) In Praise of Older Women: The amorous recollections of András Vajda 

I asked her to show me the apartment, but it impressed me only as a blue and green background to her figure, until we came to a huge round bed. Paola let me kiss and hold her, without responding; but when I began to unbutton her dress, she tried to push me away with her elbows and knees. The tight dress frustrated her efforts as much as I did, and at last I succeeded in releasing her breasts, which swelled up as they emerged from the brassiere. Neither of us had spoken, but when my head bent over her white bosom she remarked, with a tinge of malice in her voice, ‘I’m frigid, you know.’ What was I to do, standing against her, with her bare breasts cupped in my hands? ‘I’ve just come from a revolution,’ I declared manfully, but without showing my face, ‘you can’t scare me.’

(I've always wondered where you get sheets for round beds. This is a problem I have with erotica - my mind tends to stray to the practical. You know... How? Why? Good Lord is that even possible?!)

 

This is an odd book - a coming-of-age story with pseudo-autobiographical touches. It is an exploration of the protagonist's sexual development elaborated through vignettes of his experiences - from being a (virgin) pimp to the US Army as a teenager in post-World War 2 Eastern Europe, to his life in the States as a refugee academic after fleeing the Hungarian revolution. 

The protagonist is preoccupied by his lack of sexual experience, a situation he attempts to right by pursuing girls his own age - with a notable lack of success. Perhaps his move towards older women can be viewed somewhat cynically, but his encounters - often a little bizarre, and rarely turning out in his favour - are tenderly described. The protagonist is no fetishist.

This book is addressed to young men and dedicated to older women – and the connection between the two is my proposition. I’m not an expert on sex, but I was a good student of the women I loved, and I’ll try to recall those happy and unhappy experiences which, I believe, made a man out of me.

Praiseworthy (!) lines: "But I worked hardest of all studying Latin. For some reason I was convinced that I would never amount to anything if I didn’t know Latin." 

Rating: A quiet, well-written and tender erotic classic that never quite engaged me. Is this because or in spite of my being pretty much in the relevant age-group now?! 

If you liked this: older women? Hmmm… Colette's Chéri, I think {REVIEW}.

{review} smut

Alan Bennett Smut: Two Unseemly Stories (2010)

The OED defines the sort of "smut" we understand here as "indecent or obscene language". Alan Bennett's Smut consists of two stories, two "unseemly" stories. In the first, 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson', the landlady protagonist Mrs Donaldson finds herself in the unusual position of having a tenant couple pay their overdue rent by letting her watch them have sex. In the second story, 'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes', we enter the intimate world of familial sexual deception as a wife attempts to rescue her husband from the consequences of his homosexual infidelities while trying to keep his clinging mother and straying father reigned in. Both stories epitomize Bennett's marvellous ability to capture the bizarre that exists within the everyday.

‘We generally fool around a bit to start with,’ said Andy. ‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Donaldson knowledgeably. ‘Foreplay.’ Mrs Donaldson’s first instinct was to look away so that rather than frankly considering this naked young man kissing his equally naked girlfriend with his hand buried between her legs she found herself looking at the floor and wondering if it was time she had the carpet cleaned. ‘Bring back memories?’ said Laura, Andy’s face now where his hand had been. ‘Ye-es,’ said Mrs Donaldson, though the truth was it was a memory of a vase in the British Museum. In any case Laura wasn’t listening, her body lifting itself clear of the insistent head. Other things Andy was doing had not even been in the British Museum, and Mrs Donaldson found herself leaning forward and slightly to the side in order to take in what the young man was up to and where. Though his face was largely buried between Laura’s legs Andy’s one unoccluded eye detected Mrs Donaldson’s focus of attention and obligingly shifted his head so that it rested against Laura’s thigh, thus providing Mrs Donaldson with an uninterrupted view.

In 'The Greening of Mrs Donaldson', Bennett beautifully constructs the day to day life of the widowed Mrs Donaldson as she grows into her role of a lifetime, that of volunteer 'patient' for a group of medical students. There are all those clever little moments when Bennett is so Bennett-like and gnomic:

She was playing a part both at home and at work, she was quite candid about that. She was learning to pretend whereas previously (when her husband was alive) the closest she got to pretence was politeness. Until now pretence with her had never been, as they said nowadays, proactive.

The heroine of 'The Shielding of Mrs Forbes' has also hidden her intelligence under a bushel.

She wasn’t wholly infatuated, though she liked the way he looked; but, so too did he and that uninfatuated her a bit.

She works quietly behind the scenes to unravel the disaster which her considerably less intelligent husband has brought upon himself.

‘It worried me’, said Betty ‘that he spent so much time on his fingernails, although men do moisturise nowadays, don’t they?’ ‘They do,’ agreed Mr Forbes (who didn’t). ‘He was always fastidious even as a boy and he had an umbrella at a very early age. Still, I wouldn’t worry about it. He likes you, that’s the main thing.’ ‘Yes,’ said Betty, ‘but he is gay.'

...

This new Graham now left his shirt on the floor and his shoes all over the place so that Betty wondered at first if he was having a breakdown before deciding he wasn’t imaginative enough for that.

I enjoyed these two self-aware little stories and I would have enjoyed a few more along the same lines. This must be a very small book (I read it on the Kindle, so can't judge its physical size).

Rating: 7/10

If you liked this... I read Smut at the same time that The Awl was re-reading Fanny Hill which, to my mind, is far easier to classify as smut (or, less politely, as outright pornography). I couldn't face Fanny Hill again (or, indeed, any of those forbidden books read as a teenager), but for purposes of research I was pleased to see Amazon recommending me (thanks to Smut) the reasonably funny Maudie (an Edwardian classic: "It certainly was a very fine one, and it had been admired all over Europe. They’ve got a model in clay of it in Suzette de Vries’ place in the Rue Colbert. On his birthday it is hung with ribbons.") and the really quite repulsive Venus in the Country. The Awl piece suggests that one attempts to get "...its globular appendage, that wondrous treasure bag of nature's sweets, which revelled round, and pursed up in the only wrinkles that are known to please, perfected the prospect" into polite conversation this week, but my own personal project is to use all of the following from Venus in the Country: "doughty tool", "receptive dell", "furry honeypot", "female lovepot", and "warm grotto". I'll let you know if I get the sack.

 

{review} quiet days in clichy

Henry Miller Quiet Days in Clichy (1956)

A wonderful piece of ass, I reflected, watching her sail through the revolving door... a fresh, hefty piece of meat waiting to be cured and trimmed.

I can't remember where I read that Quiet Days in Clichy, Miller's semi-autobiographical memoir of 1930s' Paris, should be read in tandem with Hemingway's autobiographical-but-heavily-edited-by-other-people memoir of 1920s' Paris (A Moveable Feast).

Miller's book had its origins in his cash-strapped endeavours to write pornography for a collector at a dollar a page (there's a nice summary of this at cosmodemonic telegraph). So: if your bent for a nostalgia-tinged Paris coincides with a liking for reading about rough and ready sex narrated by someone who views all women as whores, then this is for you. Unfortunately, this was not for me. I found the descriptions of sex both brutal and unpleasant (albeit sometimes terribly funny): "I thought I'd never stop coming; it came out in steady stream, as if from a garden hose". Or: "Gripping her firmly around the waist, I shot it into her guts." I suppose I might suggest that the greater similarity between Hemingway and Miller lies less in their love of Paris and more in their misogyny. 

Miller describes his Montmartre as "nakedly vicious" and "insidiously repellent." One might usefully apply these words to Quiet Days in Clichy. I realise that I am meant to be shocked. My only other Miller read is The Colossus of Maroussi, and on the basis of that I do feel that I should persist with more Miller. I'm just not sure that I have the stomach for it. Or the guts?!

Rating: abysmally low.

If you liked this: oh dear...