Belle de Jour is the story of Séverine Sérizy, a beautiful young housewife married to a successful doctor. Her life is pretty great, except she feels like she cannot fulfil her sexual affinity for masochistic desires with her husband. She gets a job as a prostitute under the pseudonym Belle de Jour, only working from two to five each week day, so she can return before her husband gets home. Her job gets her involved with a young gangster named Marcel who allows her to explore all her sexual fantasies. However this relationship of thrills becomes far too much and life gets complicated for Séverine.

Most people will know the story of Belle de Jour as it also a classic piece of French cinema from 1967. Directed by Luis Buñuel and staring Catherine Deneuve, the film explores the exact same story in a richer and interesting way. Buñuel is a Spanish director who has worked on movies in Spain, Mexico and France; he is also acclaimed for his avant-garde surrealist style. I was blown away by this movie and I only saw the movie recently. The concepts of the movie kept swimming through my mind that I needed to read the book to find out more.

What I have found is that the story in the novel is very similar but the surrealist nature of the movie was not there. I did however gain a few insights into the life of Séverine Sérizy that I never picked up on. There is some interesting observations to be made between the connection in literature and fetish, especially with sexual sadism and sexual abuse. This has been a common problem found in books like Fifty Shades of Grey and other novels that deal with BDSM. It is a little sad to think this trope steams all the way to 1928 and maybe further. I think French erotica is really interesting and it is weird to think this was written so long ago.

If you have seen the movie Belle de Jour, then reading the book is not really beneficial. Joseph Kessel does not offer anything interesting and I think everything that made the movie great was all original content from the mind of Luis Buñuel. I plan to re-watch the film sometime so I can write a review of it. As for French erotica, I plan to read more and I am not sure what to read. I think might have to read The Story of O, but I am open to more suggestions.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/literature/book-reviews/genre/erotica/belle-de-jour... ( )

I read this book out of interest in the translator, Geoffrey Wagner, who was an acclaimed novelist with an interest in erotic writing. I had seen the Catherine Deneuve movie many years ago, and my memory of this had faded considerably, but the well-known whipping scene in the movie makes no appearance here. The book is a sensitive portrayal of a woman's spiritual relationship with her loving husband, in which her love is conflicted by overpowering desires for treatment as a prostitute. She perforce follows these desires blindly, uncomprehending the possible consequences and in the grip of a fate she cannot understand. It is a fundamentally tragic story, involving a pathology which most, I suspect, would struggle to understand, but which leaves a sadness that is difficult to reconcile. Almost incidentally, the translation is excellent, and it is not difficult to appreciate the attraction of the story to what is known of the reclusive translator's less-well-known interests. ( )

Nearly everyone says that a book is, without fail, better than a movie made from that book. Well, Luis Bunuel stood that notion on its head, taking a book that he did not like ("a bit soap-operaish") and making of it a movie that he did like, along with many other people in the paying audience who made Belle de Jour Bunuel's most profitable film. And the odd thing is that Bunuel was able to accomplish this by remaining pretty faithful to Kessel's narrative. Of course, the 22-year old Catherine Deneuve may have had something to do with it too. ( )

Belle de jour, Gallimard, 1928, inspira le film de Luis Buñuel en 1967 avec Catherine Deneuve. ( )