Flesh Unlimited (edition 2000)

This edition presents a pair of Apollinaire stories: 'The Eleven Thousand Rods' (also known as 'The Loves of a Hospodar') and 'Memoirs of a Young Don Juan', both translated by Alexis Lykiard. The former owes much to de Sade in the way it takes punitive erotica to the extremes of violence, being the memoirs of a young man who gives and receives mortal pain in furtherance of his erotic inclinations. He finds many like-minded people, male and female, in the course of his travels, but is quite indiscriminate in his choice of others to suffer the ultimate penalty in a disinterested, callous manner. Rather too bloody for the taste of many readers, I feel. The latter is a marked contrast, being a reasonably plausible account of a young man's awakening to erotic feelings in an almost educational style common to the genre. Sisters and an aunt join an assortment of willing serving wenches in contributing enthusiastically to his knowledge, and the story is much better told than many attempts at this basic plot. High class erotica, written (sometimes literally) with guts. ( )