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Loading... The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (original 2001; edition 2003)by Catherine Millet
Work InformationThe Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet (2001)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I read through some pages, but got caught up with school work and never returned to it...so far it was good. Imagine a person who is a gourmand, obsessed with food. They note every single ingredient in every dish, how they were mixed together and how that felt. Then every detail about how those ingredients were cooked and what it smelt like, what it tasted like, what it felt like to eat it and then what it felt like after the meal too. Now imagine that person is also a glutton. Now substitute food for sex and you have the thread of this book. There is so much descriptive graphic sex in this book that it stood up on its own on the bedside table. Sounds sleazy I guess but let me assure you that it is anything but. It is really well written and perceptive and engaging. You won't learn any new tricks from this book but you will recognise some honesty and let's face it, honesty about sex is pretty damn rare. If you are caught up in morality, or even worse sexual politics, you will find much to feed your prejudices here. In fact there is so much to object to here that the church has had to employ eunuchs to read it, not me though! I once read a very long article by the food critic, A.A. Gill. The article wasn't about food but it was about him going to LA to make a porn film with the industry professionals. Never a man to be afraid to take a wrong step it too was a revelation about the reality and the sheer physical endurance of those he worked with. He described them as athletes. To make a parallel from there to this book is no great step. This woman was gifted at the kind of sex she enjoyed. Initially there was some much sex that I actually got splashed while reading it. But after a while the sex just fades away and her voice becomes much clearer and a clear voice it is too. I was touched by her bravery and her honesty. Give how "weirded up" sex is in the media is really surprised me that such a book exists at all. You now what I mean, advertising is full of sex but you wont see and nipples and if anyone actually lets them slip, why, the entire media has a collective ejaculation about it. This book is a real breath of fresh air and I guess you could say that it is one woman's way of normalising something that has long since ceased being normal and she did that by a most unusual form of sex to boot. I only got two-thirds of the way through "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." It's not a good book, but that doesn't mean it's not, in its flawed way, an interesting read. In it, Catherine Millet, the editor of a noted French art magazine, describes her swinging exploits in clear-eyed detail. She describes having carnal relations with hundreds, if not thousands, of men in swinger's clubs, parking garages, bachelor apartments, and just about everywhere else in Paris. She doesn't seem to regret her sexual exploits, or, indeed, tell us how she feels about them. Her sexual exploits are presented matter-of-factly: they're just experiences she had. The book has received terrible reviews, both from professional critics and LibraryThing readers, but I think it's this flatness of tone (and perhaps an absence of contrition) that really put readers off. If what I read can be believed, many French folks seem to be able to take sex utterly casually, and this drives a lot of Americans absolutely nuts. Just because orgasms were had doesn't means lessons were necessarily learned: one thing doesn't necessarily follow the other, at least in gay Paree. There are, in any case, things I genuinely liked about the book. Millet's artistic background shows through in places: she's very cognizant of how she presents her body, and some of the scenes she describes almost are almost reminiscent of artistic tableaux. She also understands what Al Pacino's character in "Glengarry Glen Ross" understood about sex: it's not the orgasms or the mechanical aspect of it that people tend to remember but the fleeting, liminal, ambiguous moments that take place between people in intimate situations: an unexpected caress, a touch, a meaningful glance. "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." contains lots of these little moments, even if the author often follows them up with something like "I had relations with a dozen other men that night as well." A lot of reviewers here have expressed the opinion that Catherine Millet is an obviously damaged woman, and some have said that they feel sorry for her. I'm undecided on this point. There's a lot that suggests that Catherine did what she did for reasons that weren't altogether healthy: she seems to have used relationships with men to escape her suffocating family life, and she doesn't seem to know how to flirt or seduce her partners. Maybe, like many sex addicts, she got naked and had sex with people because she couldn't figure out how relate to them any other way. But her sexual life also bears an uncanny resemblance to her earliest sexual fantasies and she seldom expresses any regret about what she did or tells the reader that she didn't get what she wanted out of her adventures. It's possible that she's just a highly sexual person and that's all there is to say. And that, really, is the other problem with "The Sexual Life of Catherine M". It lacks any semblance of dramatic structure. It's more of sexual diary than an actual story, so it's not too surprising that it grows tedious after a while, despite all the erotic goings-on. Still, maybe that's the point. The title of this book is "The Sexual Life of Catherine M." However much sex she's had, I suspect that what's described here is just a sliver of her overall experience, and perhaps the only part of herself she intended to show her readers. Reviewers who felt sorry for her might have considered the fact that this lady edits an art magazine, so I'm sure that she's got some other stuff going on in her personality and in her brain. But this book is mostly just about her sex life, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing. It surprised me to find I was bored nearly to death by this book. I expected to at least be interested, but Millet's deadpan blow-by-blow recitation of her sexual life is so flat, so unemotional, so uninvolving as to be clinical and, well, boring. There's no sense of who Millet is as a person, merely the robotic recounting of encounter after encounter. Stultifying.
I suppose there is a sense in which ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.'' might be perceived as an erotic breakthrough, a daring leap into a place where no woman -- or man, for that matter -- has gone before. But that immediately raises the question: Is this really a place worth getting to? ''The Sexual Life of Catherine M.'' is as ponderous as it is heavy-breathing, which is saying a lot. As the author pursues ''fornicatory communion'' as frequently and publicly as possible, and as she approaches her mission ''with the application of a musician composing a fugue,'' she totes her critical acumen to places where it is not entirely useful. Her book lurches to and fro between the frankly obscene and the absurdly high-minded. Belongs to Publisher Series
A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex - this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.'s account of her sexual awakening and her unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. From the glamorous singles clubs of Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, she describes her erotic experiences in precise and beautiful detail. A phenomenal bestseller throughout Europe, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., like Fifty Shades of Grey, breaks with accepted ideas of sex and examines many alternative manifestations of desire. Told in spare, elegant prose, her story will shock, enlighten and liberate you. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)306.7082Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Culture and Institutions Relations between the sexes, sexualities, love Culture StudiesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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