Customer Reviews

The Sadness of Sex

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When was the last time that you read a collection of short stories so well written and colourful and that you could taste the words thick in your mouth and you flinched at the imagery. Seldom does one stumble across the work of a writer that can demonstrate such a clear understanding and command of the English language as Barry Yourgrau. In The Sadness of Sex, Yourgrau cleverly exposes an upside-down and inside-out non-reality to us by skillfully articulating those curiously insane and fleeting thoughts that most of us would fear to ever entertain. He writes in a contemporary style that is nothing short of profoundly unique. Unique because his words innocently catch you up in imaginary nets fashioned from the fabric of insightful and disturbing comedic absurdities and imagery. The Sadness of Sex is a collection of short attention span short stories, most between two and three pages long. This book is a charming collection of fiction that tricks you into simulaneously entertaining a poetic intimacy and a twisted sense of melancholy. It is a quiet journey into a world of colourful visions and lucid dreams that are a delightfully engaging and startlingly surreal. Yourgrau's The Sadness of Sex is not for everyone though. He often entices the reader into follow him down cerebral avenues where all his, and sometimes our, most peculiar psycho-sexual images and ideas hide. This book is a tribute to the unchecked thoughts, desires and innocent human emotions in all of us. If Pablo Neruda and a not-so-crass Charles Bukowski got together and wrote stories about Salvador Dali paintings while they watched Monty Python re-runs, it might start to sound a little like The Sadness of Sex.

My first copy of this book was bought at New York's Strand bookshop, and within four hours I had annotated and illustrated my copy so intensely that it became the best representation of my own interior world. The stories are so brief and so evocative, I couldn't resist filling the rest of each page's blank space with sprawling doodles and word constructions that took these ideas further. I loaned this copy to a friend, who I felt needed to see this treasure I had co-created. She left it on a bar. Gone! Yet somehow the stories within inspire me to believe some other lonely drinker found it and was encouraged on a similar quest of his own. This was microfiction before microfiction existed, and I haven't seen it done as well again since.

I read this collection of stories several years ago after finding it in my college book store. It is so beautiful and crazy and the title always intrigues everyone that reads the red letters on the yellow spine.

Somehow the stories in this book have never left me. I think about them all of the time. Definitely Yourgrau's finest work.

....I was wrong. The Sadness of Sex is the most engrossing and beautifully written novel I have picked up in years. This should be a must read for anyone expecting to spend anytime on this planet...and if you don't see its beauty when you read it...read it again! And if you still are moved by it...have your pulsed checked!