Amelie is thirty years old, the haute-bourgeoise wife of a distant husband and model mother of two picture-perfect daughters. One evening in a service station on the outskirts of the Bois de Boulogne, David drives into her life. Twenty years her senior, darkly handsome and almost embarrassingly virile, he is a suave filmmaker, a confirmed bachelor, and the perfect match for the perfect affair - but one with a twist. Anything but the conventional lonely wife, Amelie isn't looking for love; but she does find she's hungry for pleasure. Capricious, snobbish, and sometimes deceitful, she brings to the affair the same fastidious care and controlled affection that she brings to her choice of hats. Just what David thought he had in mind - until he falls in love with her.
--This text refers to the
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
What ever happened to the astringent sensuousness of Marguerite Duras or Annie Ernaux, excellent (and, one always thought, representative) French writers for whom sex is not just sex but a window on both psyche and society? In this mushy book, chic, young Amelie encounters David at a gas station late at night; she's on the way to visit her children at her parents' home, he's directing a movie there. An affair naturally follows, rendered in near-clinical detail, then gets blown out of the water by a stupid misunderstanding, with Amelie left worrying, as at the beginning, about how she looks. If your readers like hot romance in reasonably exotic settings, they might go for this debut; otherwise, you can skip it.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Like the worst--most?--of its kind, Baume's ``novel'' is psychologically little more than a very thin string whose purpose is to allow knots--scenes, that is, of real dirty sex--to be tied at intervals on its length. Parisian Am‚lie is 30, David 50. Am‚lie is married with children, David recently divorced. Don't expect to hear more than a word or two of David's earlier domestic life; and of Am‚lie's current one only the news once and again (and again, and again) that husband and daughters are out of town, away on business, in the country, or visiting the US. In a handful of excruciatingly artificial opening pages, the lovers-to-be meet tr‚s cute on a Paris street where David (a filmmaker) is doing a shoot. Story? There will be sex in David's apartment, sex on a trip to Marrakech, sex in David's apartment, sex in David's office, sex in David's (he's so successful) country estate--where the affair begins to cool as it gradually becomes clear that David is a cold fish (``I've got to trim some shrubs. You don't mind, do you?''), finally allowing Am‚lie to start over again with somebody else. Not much there, although the abysmally translated novel in the meantime provides a good supply of entertainment both verbal and dramatic: ``Right now, here? Am‚lie sounded disconcerted.'' ``He was moving deliberately slowly, but Am‚lie remained tight as a clam.'' Am‚lie, says one page, ``had David on the brain,'' while the next explains presciently that she ``realized that her mind was a void.'' There is, yes, sex, sex sex- -``Am‚lie moaned as his dick rubbed the walls of her cunt''--though at times it gets rather alarmingly out of control: ``Emerging from orgasm, Am‚lie was astonished, as she always was, by the way her shuddering cunt took possession of her entire body before beating a hasty retreat.'' Shallow, ill done, absurd. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
CRASHED,
By
This review is from: Crush: An Erotic Novel (Hardcover)
Amelie is a married woman bored in a coventional marriage where she is more like a care-taker and cook rather than a senuous woman craving for affections of her husband. A small excursion to fill her car with gas results in a tryst with David, a film maker, who is bewitched over the beauty of this woman. The setting is great, the two characters good and there isn't any doubt that this story will reach greater heights.
Crush unfortunately crashes. Sure, there are explicit descriptions of the sexual act but after awhile you'll fall into boredom. The novel fails to evoke any tensions in the character's lives. You're contantly wondering where the plot (or lack there of) is going. Yes, there is sex but when there is not story behind why the characters are acting this way you end up with a clinical assessment of two humans copulating. Where is the passion, intrigue and eroticism that this novel is attempting to evoke? In all fairness to the author the translation from the French could be the problem. If so, a book that has so many possibilities has been done an injustice. As it stands Crush can be forgotten until a newer translation emerges.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The story was flat, one-dimonsional--hardly "novel" worthy.,
By
This review is from: Crush: An Erotic Novel (Hardcover)
What more to say? Ok. The end was particularly disappointing, seeming to simply fall into the very "void" Amelie so often feels. "The doorbell" (obviously) rang" for the La Baume as well as she beats a hasty retreat from providing her readers with any sense of real-life closure to the notion of an "affair." It was, in her words, "a fright."
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
mysterious and beautiful,
By "jwtweedy" (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Crush: An Erotic Novel (Paperback)
What a frank and talented writer, and full of promise. I look forward to her next.
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