10 erotic books of yesterday and today, to stimulate eros and fantasy
The success of Fifty Shades of Gray, justified or not, disturbing contribution to erotic literature or ballooning with the hype of marketing, had the merit of reopening the discourse, of awakening an area of fiction that has been dormant for too long: erotic literature.
Erotic literature is not a "modern invention, on the contrary: since language has existed, eros has existed." We could even say that before language there was only sex, and that eros was born with writing. Eros is, like the Greek god of love, an "image," a cultural invention. A linguistic game that tries to say the unspeakable: desire, death. It is no coincidence that around sex and the ways of saying it, there is that erotic literature that is lost in a very distant past, in which we see One Thousand and One Nights and the shining examples of Sappho and Ovid. These 10 books will make you travel in the maze and complexity of female eroticism
Fifty Shades of Gray
Let's start with the obvious, what everyone knows. Fifty Shades of Gray, by EL James, international best seller, seen on all the beaches, subways, benches in the world. Transversely in the hands of women, men, ladies and bad guys " girls.
Then followed by shades of black and red, it tells the story of Anastasia, a willing young virgin who falls in love with the rich and handsome Christian Gray. And since beauty and love no longer have anything innocent about them (see Bella di Twilight and his romantic love, a fierce vampire), Christian turns out to be a lover of BDSM, a dominator who loves to tie her up and whip her.
The joy of giving them is accompanied by that of taking them, as happens in true love.
And L James
Fifty Shades of Gray
Mondadori
Histoire d "O
When the scandals were still authentic, or when the bourgeoisie still fed on morality and hypocrisy, came Histoire d "O, written in 1954 by Pauline Réage, pseudonym under which the couple Anne Descos and Jean Paulhan hid.
Or is she so in love with René that she accepts to become his property, to give to other men, to sodomize, to whip, to tie up, to finally give to someone else forever. If anyone talks about the scandal for Fifty shades, maybe he didn't read this.
In 1975 a film was made, with a naked, and always tied up, Corinne Clery. Arrived in an era of advanced feminism, the film seemed made to scandalize those who wanted to bring the scandal into the bourgeoisie, and the male power system. What if freedom also consisted of giving one's body as a pledge to one's beloved?
Pauline Réage
Histoire d "O
ES editions
Emmanuelle
In 1959 Emmanuelle arrives clandestinely, written by Emmanuelle Arsan, although many sources would prove that the true author is her husband, the diplomat Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane. Released in 1967, it became a cult film in 1974, a year before the film Histoire d "O, and directed by the director himself, Just Jaeckin.
The story: Emmanuelle, wife of a French diplomat (the vertigo between the real and the invented is here the fuse of eros), lives her sexuality in a free and emancipated way, finding many partners on her path, while remaining in love with her. husband. His sexual freedom will be expressed indiscriminately with women and men, with friends and strangers.
Emmanuelle, with Histoire d "O, has contributed a lot, thanks above all to cinematographic transpositions, to overcoming the common sense of modesty.
Emmanuelle Arsan
Emmanuelle
ES editions
The ages of Lulu
Published for the first time in 1989, The Ages of Lulù, by Almudena Grandes, tells of a little girl who discovers her body, and sex, and eats voraciously.
Among many sexual adventures, more and more unbridled, Lulù lives on his skin that climate of enthusiasm experienced in Spain at the end of the Franco regime, which produced, among others, characters like Pedro Almodòvar and his first, wild films.
Halfway between an erotic novel (very intense) and a coming-of-age novel, Lulu it was hugely successful, and enjoyed many reprints. To contribute to the success of this transgressive and joyful work, Bigas Luna, who made a film with Francesca Neri in 1990, was also involved.
Almudena Grandes
The ages of Lulu
Guanda
100 brush strokes before going to sleep
And here is our local Age of Lulu, 100 brush strokes before going to sleep, a phenomenon of fiction and the market, highly read and highly criticized, analyzed in television talk shows and more discussed than understood.
Melissa P. is a "sex-educated teenager by indulging in disreputable adventures for a little girl. The marketing game of making believe that the scandalous Melissa in the tale was the author Melissa Panarello worked, and success was assured."
100 brush strokes tells the adventures and sexual experiments of this Italic Lulu, without however that sense of civil liberation that accompanied the novel by Almudena Grandes. In fact, in Panarello's novel, from which a film produced by Francesca Neri, the cinematic Lulu, Melissa gives herself to sex as a gesture desperate, just to hear something. An apt portrait, putting aside snobbery, of a generation anesthetized by emotions.
Melissa Panarello
100 brush strokes before going to sleep
Fazi publisher
The sex life of Catherine M.
Another editorial case, an example of how direct experience and confession take the place of literary invention: The sex life of Catherine M., unlike Melissa P., speaks openly about the sexual experiences of its author, Catherine Millet .
Millet, curator and art critic, loves sex, and practices it without asking too many questions with strangers, in the back of a van on the edge of the highway, or during private orgies where everyone is friends and everyone has the same free view of the sex.
The sex life of Catherine M. it is the perfect example of the contemporary blend of public confession of intimate experiences, skillful marketing operations, and the view of sex as consumption and immediate need. The author is still honest, and talks about sex life, not erotic.
Catherine Millet
The sex life of Catherine M.
Mondadori
Tropic of Cancer
One of the cult books of eros and beyond. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller, followed by Tropic of Capricorn, was written in Paris, where the writer had fled from the United States, conformists and puritans.
Tried for obscenities in the US, banned from the US for 30 years, Tropic of Cancer, set in Paris, was first published there in 1934, and continues to be published, including in Italy. It tells the erotic story of an American in Paris, a little "invented" a little bit autobiographical, in the French bohemian of writers, painters, pimps and prostitutes, with their sexual freedom and the artistic experiments of that unrepeatable era.
It was brought to Italy by Feltrinelli in 1962, also facing a long judicial controversy at home.
Henry Miller
Tropic of Cancer
Feltrinelli
The Delta of Venus
"Focus on sex, forget about poetry." This recommended the writer Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin, when he entrusted her with a book of erotic stories that he would not be able to write, as busy as he was to write Tropic of Cancer
Thus was born The Delta of Venus, a collection of beautifully written erotic stories, where despite Miller's brisk request, there is such refinement of style as to make Nin one of the best erotic writers of her time, and also of the present.
Nin's career, entirely dedicated to eros, then found its best expression in the Diaries, where he also wrote about his menage à trois with Miller and his wife June, from which the book would later be born, and the film of the same name, Henry & June.
Anaïs Nin's adventure almost never deviates from the work, marking one of those dizzying cases of mingling between reality and literary production.
Anaïs Nin
The Delta of Venus
Bompiani
The Swiss
'The Swiss it is a novel but it is also my body that has become writing. The writing pierced the body with violence and pleasure, and everything was distilled into the narrative. C "is, in the Svizzero, the celebration of a carnal pomp between two people, but also of a physical dimension of love for a city, which becomes a silent accomplice and the scene of a destructive and necessary encounter ".
"There is a prismatic dimension of the word eroticism, which is a narration of intimacy, literature of the abyss: it is its dark side, the hidden and vulnerable part. The unveiling, the mise-en-scene, is one splendid obscenities: this is what I have tried to do in this novel, in a pseudo-autobiography game, where the plausible and the true are always an enigma on which fundamental elements are played, which here are intimate geography and economy as unbridled power . The Swiss it is Zurich, it is a loss, a lacerating wound, a pain, an unfinished writing, which continues in successive narratives and new loves, which are life but also writing, for those who, like me, are destined for this. Or damned ".
This is what the author Francesca Mazzucato replied about her novel, when we asked her to tell us about it.
Francesca Mazzucato
The Swiss
Giraldi Publisher
Fear to fly
With a little forcing, it can be said that Erica Jong's Fear of Flying is the erotic novel for feminists.
Written in 1973, it was often accused of pornography, and soon became a cult, also thanks, perhaps, to a protagonist who spoke and practiced sex with frankness, as if she were a man. After the (ultramillennial) era of the contrast between saints and whores, Fear to fly it speaks of a married woman who, unable to feel pleasure, seeks him away from her husband.
Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing is a thirty-year-old poet married to a Chinese psychoanalyst, who meets Adrian at a psychoanalysis conference, a psychoanalyst who will initiate her into the pleasure of sex for sex. Dialogue, detailed, obsessive and perhaps a little dated, Fear to fly it marked an "epoch and a generation, a bit like" the porn movie Deep Throat did in the cinema.
Erica Jong
Fear to fly
Bompiani
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