The Sexual Life Of Catherine M - Softcover

Millet, Catherine

2.82

3,562 ratings by Goodreads

9780552771726: The Sexual Life Of Catherine M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0552771724 ISBN 13: 9780552771726

Publisher: Corgi, 2003

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'One of the most explicit books about sex ever written by a woman' Edmund White

A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex – this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.’s unabashed autobiography, the story of her sexual awakening and 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 the recent Fifty Shades of Grey, breaks with accepted ideas of sex and examines the alternative manifestations of desire. Told in spare, elegant prose, her story will shock, enlighten and liberate you.

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Product Description:

Edition Corgi Books, 2003. Translated from French by Adriana Hunter. ISBN: 0-552-77172-4. PAPERBACK. 224 pages, size: 12.7 x 19.8 x 1.6 cm. Just light tan to paper edges. Other than that, the unread book remains in very good condition throughout: Soft cover intact; text all clean, neat and tight. Prompt dispatch from UK.

Review:

A publishing sensation upon its original publication in France, Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M is one of the most sexually explicit books ever written by a woman. Ostensibly a semi-autobiographical account of the sexual life of the author, the editor of an influential Parisian art magazine, the book is a frank and detailed account of Millet’s development from an awkward, guilt-ridden Catholic teenager to sophisticated Parisian intellectual and enthusiastic member of the singles bars, orgies and public sex spaces of Paris.

The book has no sequential narrative. Instead, it offers a frank and extremely graphic celebration of the pursuit and gratification of sex. Millet praises the virtues of anonymous sex, admitting that "I can account for forty-nine men whose sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can attribute a name or, at least, in a few cases, an identity. But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity". Nevertheless, she proceeds to offer page after page of exhausting descriptions of sexual couplings in groups in houses, car parks, offices, toilets, museums--the list and the permutations are endless, as are Millet’s descriptions of her own sexual organs and her ability to perform oral sex. Millet wants to celebrate the personal freedom and physical pleasure that casual, anonymous sex offers a woman, but this is never fully explored beyond her assertion that "the certainty that I could have sexual relations in any situation with any willing party" was "the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of the pier". Much of the book’s language is equally prosaic. Ultimately, this is a book about sexual fantasy, but as Millet herself admits, "sexual fantasies are far too personal for them ever really to be shared". Millet is too busy describing the literal nuts and bolts, the grunts and bumps of (resolutely heterosexual) sex to produce eroticism on a par with her obvious models, Pauline Reage’s Story of O and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which leaves The Sexual Life of Catherine M feeling rather naughty, but strangely dated.--Jerry Brotton

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