Customer Reviews

The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

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It is always fun to have an erotic work presented in a serious way and have it become popular. This was the case with Nicholson Baker's fictional _Vox_ some years back, and of course the short stories of Anaïs Nin. Good old Grove Press has been seriously printing erotic books for decades, and now has produced _The Sexual Life of Catherine M._ (note the ironic homage to _The Story of O_) by Catherine Millet. Millet is the editor of the Paris magazine _Art Press_, and has written several serious books on contemporary art. When her memoir was published in France last year, there were many intellectuals who were nfuriated that she was somehow trying to purge her sexual demons by publishing such a frank memoir about some extraordinary sexual adventures. In the US, her book won't infuriate intellectuals as much as it will infuriate the prudish and those who are offended by a woman of broad sexual appetite satisfying that appetite; but it also may well offend those who buy it thinking that every page will have words to inflame the passion and excite the imagination. This isn't a book for them.

Let us be clear: there is plenty of sex in the book. What Millet likes is men, lots of men, often in rapid sequence and simultaneously. Her lifelong hobby seems to have been orgies, swinging clubs, and being passed from one satisfied man to another. She describes plenty of episodes of men, more or less unknown to her, penetrating, licking, caressing; if this is disturbing, one only has to recall that she was enjoying it as were they, and that one has one's own sexual peccadilloes to nurture. The prose here is in translation (by Adriana Hunter), and so it is hard to tell how much to praise Millet for the words themselves, but in this edition they are vivid but also detached. She is not a seductress. She was simply available: "...this note that a friend put in a diary, which still gives me a glow of pride: 'Catherine, who deserves the highest praise for her calmness and availability in every situation.'" She writes often with sly wit; doing a particular stroke on a partner, "With my back bent and my frenetic arm movements, I must have looked very like a housewife desperately trying to stop a sauce from curdling, or someone proudly finishing up a home improvement." Her availability must have served her well: "I have never had to suffer any kind of clumsiness or brutality, and I have generally been lucky with the attentiveness of my partners."

Only fleeting parts of this book could serve as sexual stimulants. Millet has obviously enjoyed her sexual life, and has reflected intelligently on it in a non-euphemistic and frank way. Many of the activities described are exhausting, some depressing, but some are as exhilarating as exploring uncharted lands. To have achieved her status in her career, she must have skills in communicating and getting along with people in other than sexual ways, but little of that is on display here. She has had relations with hundreds of men, and can count only 49 whose faces she would recognize. There is no feminist harangue here, no claim of victory. She does not have the way most women would want to conduct themselves, nor is hers a model to which to aspire. But unapologetic, and lucid, her book gives a fascinating look at woman fulfilling her life in a unique way.

Do yourself a favor, skip this mess. It's boring, repetitive, badly written, and translated poorly. Often the ramblings are just incoherent. There are inexplicably long paragraphs that start with one subject, switch to something unrelated, and end with yet another story.

If the eroticism is what interests you, skip this book: You will be disappointed. Amazon.com has a wide selection of much better erotica to select from or you can go to literotica.com to get stories from amateurs written a hundred times better than this mess.

I read this entire book over the course of a transatlantic airline flight. From cover to cover, with interuptions in order to choose between "chicken or beef" and watch The Hulk two times running.

If I said I'd bought it to be titillated, I'd probably be missing the point. Which is a good job, really, because I found it about as erotic as an episode of Antiques Roadshow.

If I said I'd bought it for it's literary merits, and the enthusiastic praise on the back of the book, I'd be closer to the mark. The promised sex was just a bonus.

But, sadly, I was disappointed on both counts.

This is a book detailing, in explicit, but not remotely arousing detail, the prodigious sexual exploits of Catherine Millet. From the first time she had group sex, not long after she lost her virginity, to anonymous orgies in carparks in Bois de Boulogne, all of the details are written down in cold, clinical detail which makes them about as erotic as a pathology report.

Catherine M is thusly hailed as a pioneer, breaking apart gender stereotypes. She makes it very clear throughout the book that she's in the driving seat of her sexual life. Saying that, however, I really disagree with this idea.

One of the most obvious things one notices reading the book is the cold, clinical nature of Catherine's adventures. She really doesn't seem to gain any pleasure from any of these adventures. The results of her promiscuity, such as an STD and, later, an abortion, are described in throwaway detail as if they were as mundane an event as brushing her teeth.

I'm not sure if this is because of lacklustre translation (I wouldn't mind getting a copy of the original next time I'm in Paris)or simply because Catherine M is a cold, clinical woman. If that's the case, one has to ask why she'd go through all of these adventures if she appears to receive so little pleasure from them. She's not proud of her liberated sexuality, nor is she ashamed of it. Sex is described as something she submits herself to for no apparent reason. A real, liberated woman would surely be in charge of her sexuality for her own reasons of enjoyment and empowerment, instead of a sort of volontary submissive, as Catherine seems to be.

Or, perhaps, I am simply not getting the whole idea of the book. If so, please let me know!

As a preface, let me say that I bought the book and tried to read it. I'm not someone who goes around writing bad reviews about dirty books. That said, there isn't much to recommend in this book. On some level, it might be considered a feminist work in that it talks about a woman "breaking the mold" by having hundreds of sexual partners. It seems that the "breaking the mold" theme was done years ago in Fear of Flying. I'm not even going to start getting into the debate about whether unprotected sex with mulitple partners advances anyone's cause.

The story fails as an erotic work; the letters sections of most men's magazines are more erotic. Much of the book is along the lines of, "I went to an orgy, laid in a recliner, and let everyone have a go. The next day, I went to an orgy, ...." Far too much of the book repeats the same old things in the same old way. There's no humor to it, and there doesn't seem to be much enjoyment. Occassionally there is some self-reflection, but it isn't especially well-written either. This is a depressing story (it would be equally depressing if a man was telling it, but I think more people would be jumping up and talking about the actor's reprehensible conduct). The hardback version seems over priced and overly long by about 75%.

Given the positive pre-press I read about the English-language version of this book-and there was SO much!-I felt I was predetermined to enjoy it. I was wrong.

I wanted to read a memoir about a woman with whose sexual life I had something in common, even knowing I had not experienced quite such a level of, um ... activity. I wanted to learn what drove her to be so promiscuous: Physical drives? Insecurity? A need to please? A desire to be dominant? Or submissive? Perhaps just a motivation to live `la vida loca' or trump everyone else's adventures?

Even having read the book, I can't answer these questions. I certainly knew it wouldn't be erotica, but I was interested in how an accomplished woman of her cultural and socio-economic status might relate her experiences to her place in our times. After all, she is of an age to have been exposed to feminism.

Amazingly, even given her self-absorption, she turns out not to be introspective in any manner that enlightens readers. I finished this book not understanding her motivations yet suspecting, sadly, that they had something to do with self-annihilation. (She writes disturbingly about disassociating herself from her sexual encounters--and who wouldn't, if you let a line of Parisian workers have a go at you in the back of a corrugated metal municipal van that leaves your backside raw)?

And dare I, as an American, say it without sounding close-minded or ethnocentric?--the intellectual posturing was so "French". There was NOTHING intellectual about the author's reminiscences about her escapades. Such intellectualism would imply cultural context--and there was none. There are no clues about the years in which she lives or the cultural pressures/dictates by which she might be influenced.

If readers can't draw broader conclusions from her experience that might relate to their lives, why read this?

This is the type of book that shows up occasionally in the literature, a true oddity that stands alone, unclassifiable in terms of known genres, not quite what it appears to be, but not entirely different from it, either. I am thinking of St. Exupery's LITTLE PRINCE, or Pauline Reage's THE STORY OF O: the first not a children's story, the second not a sadomasochistic tract. Each a single, luminous object that cannot be imitated, that will never be the foundation of its own genre, each destined for eternal life, yes, but a lonely and isolated existence.

Catherine Millet's SEXUAL LIFE has not plot, no time line, no sequencing; it is an ongoing sketch (cartoon like) of a female body being used for sexual purposes by various men at once, with the glad cooperation of the body's owner; it is a female body taking full advantage of a variety of more or less annonymous male bodies at once, with each male organ, once spent, being replaced mechanically by another of a different size, or shape, or color, or texture, or agility, to be fitted into a hand, or a mouth, or any of the other pockets available for penetration, and there to be coddled and rubbed and teased to extinction; and once extinct to be replaced by another and another, and another.

The narrative is a mystery because is seems purposeless. This challenges the reader to create a reason, if not for the book, at least for the reading of the book to the end; and that, sooner or later, is the real challenge of this work.

....

The sexual life? No. A much more fitting title would be "The Sexual Death of Catherine M."

This is a first person account of a woman who says that her favorite part of group sex is when she is (not sure what word to use here) so completely that she leaves her body, much in the way that prostitutes or rape victims are said to dissociate during sex. In other words, she seeks obliteration of self and body through sex. She says nothing, feels nothing, and often sees nothing of what is going on.

Well, um, okay. Was she awake during the sex? Was she awake during the time she was writing about the sex? Your guess is as good as mine.

I believe this is supposed to be a literary deconstruction of a sex life. It very well may be that. But even with that literary pretension, this is a lethargic, numbing, pointless, badly written, dispassionate, often repellent, always dull book. It fails as a literary work, and it certainly fails as a piece of erotica. I could not quote one passage that I would call erotic. She actually uses the phrase "...drooling out of me to the ground..." and I will let you finish that up in your imagination as to context. Is this sexy? I'm voting "no." I have to admit that I could not finish it, though I tried, I really did. Maybe the blurbers read a different book than I did. Some of these reviewers certainly must have.

This wilfully picaresque sexual odyssey claims to narrate Millett's multitudinous carnal prostrations before numberless male predators in the (mostly)anonymous circumstances of what could euphemistically be termed swingers' parties but which might more properly be decoded as de facto gang-bangs. Preening herself without the slightest trace of self-consciousness as a 'spunk bag'(in Adriana Hunter's English translation) for her suitors, Millett dilates freely on being 'shafted' by one partner, fellating another whilst solacing two further suitors manually (her anus being spared on this occasion for future encounters). This mechanistic passing-in-review of sexual permutations has recently been greeted by British reviewers as an apolitical celebration of a descried 'new stage' in the supposed onward march of female sexual self-expression and assertiveness. I beg to differ--for the kaleidoscope of imagery advanced here (there is no 'plot' and all exists in the eternal present of the authoress's somewhat repetitive recalls of past time), connects little with common experience of female sexuality. What such sado-masochistic images DO very triumphantly achieve however amounts to a magnificently pungent satire on the habitual content of that almost exclusively male sub-genre: hard-core pornography. For this (male) reader the book comes together most coherently when read as an archly constructed spoof and (well-taken)critique of male pornofantasies. Read at face value on the naturalistic level the book is merely bemusing (I do not find the joys implicitly claimed for her numberless couplings or 'quadruplings' remotely credible-more verisimilitudinous is her account of a painfully paralysed arm after strenuous manual stimulation of one of her sexual beneficiaries).
I bought the book because its blurb (by Edmund White) suggested that it explored the somewhat fugitive entity of female sexuality with a rare candour. Alas, I remained unenlightened in that regard since Millett rather perversely removes the most important, emotional dimension of female experience from her meditations. Of Millett the person beyond her erogenous zones we get little inkling. On the positive side, though, I was able to find a 'reader-response' access by viewing the volume as a somewhat disconcerting mirror held up to male sexuality (in whose excesses the authoress colludes for reasons which intuitively appear to be 'masochistic' but which her strangely unrevealing memoir ultimately leaves opaque). It is good that Ms. Millett has emerged from activities which must count functionally as tantamount to those of a 'sex worker' so physically unscathed by male psychosexual volatilities and indeed with such an apparently benign attitude to men. Not all in her position(s) have been so lucky.

Catherine Millet has provided us with a quite remarkable insight into a certain kind of female sexuality. With remarkable frankness, she leads the reader through an extraordinary range of experiences with a good deal of self-reflection, very little moralizing and a total lack of political correctness (hooray!). While there is an obvious inclination to focus on the extremes of her sexual behavior that go well beyond the normal range of experiences of most of us, in fact the majority of the book explores the nitty gritty of the kinds of activity that are much more mainstream. And perhaps we can be grateful that someone else has done the dirty work of accumulating the range of experiences necessary to make the insights authoritative!

This is not a work of erotica, in my opinion. And if an open discussion of sexual activity between consenting adults makes you uneasy or worse, or offends your morals, don't read this book. But, if you think you might enjoy an unprecedented, direct and thoughtful consideration of the sexuality of a very interesting woman, this book comes highly recommended

Some have termed this book courageous for its inside look into the free (of responsibility and emotion) sexual life of a woman. I plunked down $ hoping to gain some unique insight into the emotional consequences of such a lifestyle and perhaps learn something I could apply to my own life. Instead, I felt like a voyeur who was only treated to the mechanical/physical side of a strange wanderlust with no insight into emotion or inner transformation. It provided neither insight nor erotica if one is looking for that. I have read novels such as Shade of the Maple by Kirk Martin that force a more thoughtful examination of one's relationships and self-concept, and which hit home very personally.