This new translation of Bataille's first short novel - published in
France in 1928, it predates the more renowned Story of O - arrives
with blurbs from Susan Sontag and Jean-Paul Sartre that may or may
not convince you that this unabashed, undecorated pornography
approaches a "serious literary genre." The youthful narrator and
his friends - Simone, Marcelle, and Sir Edmond - move from kinky
but harmless sex-play (it may do for eggs what Last Tango did for
butter) to the nauseating seduction-murder-mutilation of a
terrified priest. Perhaps Simone's thigh games with the priest's
eye (or maybe Marcelle's suicide) are what propel this tale into
the realms of literature, but "Indeed, we virtually never stopped
having sex," and Neugroschel's totally accessible translation moves
the French vernacular into American vernacular with paperback-porn
panache. Daring in its time, undoubtedly, but strangely familiar
now. (Kirkus Reviews)
Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century. It appears here with Susan Sontag’s superb study of pornography as art, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, and Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’.
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