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Disappointing. I don't think her experience is all that terribly unusual. Many people go through periods of abstention, usually not as long, and usually not self enforced.
Caution Spoiler:
Her story struck me as though she grew weary of and her body rejected being used by men who did not love her but found her a convenient lover. I believe that she was tired of being an appliance. I can understand her desire to get away from that situation, in fact I think it was noble of her to do so. If a situation is not fulfilling one's happiness then they should endeavor to change. Take a vacation from men, and leave loveless sex forever. But then it struck me that rather than trying to find a meaningful loving relationship, she just seemed to take much smug satisfaction at being the odd woman out and watching her friends scramble to fix her life, while their own were so obviously full of faults. So after quite some period of time she began to feel "insinuating vibrations" and the book ends with her starting an affair with a married man. Perhaps all she wants from life are on and off periods of loveless sex. It struck me that she wasted her sexual prime trying to prove some point to herself and her friends, but in the end what ever that point was, she didn't seem to learn it very well.
End of Spoiler
This book was very short, possibly thankfully so. It is divided up into short vignettes that I invariably found were just starting to get interesting and I would flip the page to find that it ended two or three sentences later. It seemed to be written with some artsy Victorian modesty that implied much but told very little. I found the prose too flowery and vague.Read more ›
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Translators have a very difficult job. Oftentimes the true intent of a story is lost when translating it from one language to another. I'm afraid that may be what happened in this book, starting with the title. I never got the sense of why the author, a French woman, "suddenly" gave up sex. Her younger years were "frisky", starting with a seduction when she was in her early teens and she didn't know how to say no. And it didn't seem to be a matter of waking up one morning in her 30s and deciding she didn't want intimacy with anyone except on a platonic level; it was a gradual realization. I was attracted to this topic because I have lost interest in sexual intimacy and I wanted to learn how others dealt with this issue. I am in my 60s, so you might say that I, like many older women, lose interest. True, but I also have had surgery which might have affected my libido. But in this age of limitless communication, I have come across people of all ages who don't have an interest in sexual matters. Many call themselves "asexuals" and want to be included in the LGBT club. Point is, we're not stuck for all time in any particular group. We are all in a state of flux, transformation, mutation, morphing, shape shifting, whatever. The author has discovered this by the end of her story. It's certainly a topic that can generate more discussion. Not having an interest in sexual matters is not unnatural, it is one of the paths some follow.
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I pre-ordered this book a few months before it was released. I was SO looking forward to it, I thought as the title says, that it would be about WHY a woman suddenly gave up sex. It is not. The book consists of short chapters, each one separate from the others (it's not a linear story). Each of these chapters simply tells of an experience she had as a person who is not dating. And they are not interesting or funny experiences, just dry retellings of what happened at X place on X day. At no point does the author go into an explanation or even the emotional aspect of why she gave up sex. There are no insights to be found here.
I gave 2 stars instead of 1 because the author does know how to write. But that makes it all the more frustrating, she COULD have written something meaningful, she has the writing skills. Instead it seems she was just trying to write an "artsy" book with no real point to it. Too bad the title is so misleading.
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This is a completely worthless book. The book has about 150 pages but close to 30 are empty, used for opening new chapters, or separating fragments. The book consists of several very short fragments ("chapters"?), most of them without any significant content. One can read the entire book in about one hour. I wonder if it took any longer to write. The thesis is interesting and there might be up to three or maximum four very brief places in the entire production when it becomes funny or even slightly interesting. As a whole, it seems though that the book shouldn't have appeared in print at all. Not worth the resources involved, or people's time.
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This is a short memoir. It is about a relatively short period in the author's life when, although she is young and beautiful, she abstains from sex. There is a short time when a reader will think that the premise--examining one's life independent of a sexual relationship--is an interesting one. There is a longer time, in this short book, when the author spends much too long describing how she must fend off well meaning friends who wish to find her "someone." In fact, she must spend so much time impressing her friends (and readers) with how attractive she is, despite her choice to abstain, that a short book eventually comes to seem--endless. It is a relief, not a disappointment, when she finally does take a lover.
M. Feldman
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This item: The Art of Sleeping Alone: Why One French Woman Suddenly Gave Up Sex
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