A breathless (heavily autobiographical) novelistic account of the life of a young woman who sells her body for a living, Whore is a searing look at the world's oldest profession and a confessional in the tradition of Sylvia Plath. "Cynthia," as the nameless narrator calls herself professionally, is a French-Canadian Catholic from the sticks who escapes her strict upbringing and stifling parents to move to Montreal as soon as she is old enough. One day she answers the ad of an escort agency and quickly becomes compelled by her strange new calling. Her visitors include an Orthodox Jew cheating on his piety, a boorish Muslim with a deformed arm, a never-ending parade of businessmen and fathers, and a young man whose youth and fitness disturbs her more than any of the rest of them. Cynthia never glamorizes her life—contempt, anger, and resignation ring out from the pages—but her descriptions are engrossing and her prose incisive. Nelly Arcan delivers an unyielding, poetic, and deeply personal account of one whore's life.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Billed by her publisher as "literary erotica," Arcan's semi-autobiographical debut novel is an unremittingly ugly rant by a precocious, petulant daughter against the silent, bedridden mother who didn't love her enough and the devoted, God-fearing father who loved her too much. Born in a small Canadian frontier town near the border with Maine and raised in a fanatically Catholic community there, Arcan's good-girl, savagely self-destructive narrator moves to Montreal to attend college. As her studies drag on, she grows increasingly fascinated by the city's XXX shops. Without really understanding why, she answers an ad placed by a high-end escort service, takes 'Cynthia' as her whore-name and starts to make a lucrative career of her previously unprofitable self-loathing and nihilism. The novel itself is a series of hateful tirades that, although bitter, raunchy and repetitive, occasionally offer up some pointed insights. "I didn't become a whore with the first client," Cynthia explains. "No, it was long before that, during the figure skating and tap dancing of my childhood, in the fairy tales where you had to be the most beautiful and sleep yourself to distraction." In the end, though, it's impossible to feel any real sympathy for a raging misanthrope who crows with no small pride that "there's too much hate in me for a single head" or, some might argue, for a single book. Agent, Georges Borchardt.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Save your time and money -0 stars,
By Alyn "Alyn" (LA, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Whore (Paperback)
Holy run on sentence. One period per paragraph.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An immature writer with some promise,
By
This review is from: Whore (Paperback)
This novel is pure narrative. If a writer was needing to hear the most basic creative writing mantra, "show don't tell," it is Nelly. Whoo Nelly. She is angry in the classic l'enfant terrible way. She performs oral so frequently on men that they blur, much like her life. She fails to devolve into specifics. The novel fails as it never escapes the confines of ranting. There are some stunning passages and I feel Arcan can write well. She could easily manouver through temporal sequences from a narrative, which is a hard skill to attain.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Not Worth The Effort,
This review is from: Whore (Paperback)
I got to page 34 of, out of 172, before finally giving up on this piece of trash. I'm not commenting on the subject. The life of a prostitute, and how a woman chooses to become one, can be interesting. Frankly, if you want to read an entertaining and coherent account of that, pick up `The Happy Hooker', by Xaviera Hollander.
Nelly Arcan might be a talented whore. As a writer, she leaves a lot to be desired. This book is nothing but stream-of-conciousness presented as a series of run-on sentences. Don't get me wrong. A well placed and thought out run-on can be useful but, like anything, can be overdone. Arcan overdoes it by orders of magnitude. Not to mention the constant shifts is tense and point-of-view. Have you ever tried to listen to a teen-age girl explain anything? It can make you dizzy. That's how I felt by the time I threw in the towel. The book reads like one long excuse for her decision to become a whore. And that's a word she loves very much. Whore. She uses it constantly. Like an epithet hurled in the reader's face. She denies it, of course. Raised by Catholic nuns, hates her mother, loves her overly pious father, lives in the shadow of her deceased sister. Naturally, she becomes a prostitution. Who wouldn't, under those circumstances? If you must read this tripe, do so while still in the bookstore. Read the first eleven pages. You'll get everything you need by then. However, to be fair to the author, it was translated. Maybe it reads better in French.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Yes, life's gone right through me, I didn't dream these thousands of men in my bed, my mouth, didn't invent their sperm all over me, in my face, my eyes, I've seen it all and still do every day, or almost, tips of men, only their cocks, tip ends of cocks turned on by I don't know what, since it isn't me they're getting hard for, never has been, it's my whoredom, the fact that I'm there for that, to suck them over and over, gulping down these cocks one after another as if I were going to empty them once and for all, finally get what they have to say out of them, but anyway, I'm nothing when it comes to all this gushing out, it could just as well be somebody else, not even another whore but some doll made of air, a piece of some spun-sugar image, a mouth positioned at a leaking point that opens as they come from the idea that they have what it takes to make you come, as they get it on in the sheets, causing a face, hard nipples, a wet, quivering slit to materialize, as they try to believe that these bits of women were made for them and that they're the only ones who know how to get them off, the only Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Nelly Arcan New!
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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Yes, life's gone right through me, I didn't dream these thousands of men in my bed, my mouth, didn't invent their sperm all over me, in my face, my eyes, I've seen it all and still do every day, or almost, tips of men, only their cocks, tip ends of cocks turned on by I don't know what, since it isn't me they're getting hard for, never has been, it's my whoredom, the fact that I'm there for that, to suck them over and over, gulping down these cocks one after another as if I were going to empty them once and for all, finally get what they have to say out of them, but anyway, I'm nothing when it comes to all this gushing out, it could just as well be somebody else, not even another whore but some doll made of air, a piece of some spun-sugar image, a mouth positioned at a leaking point that opens as they come from the idea that they have what it takes to make you come, as they get it on in the sheets, causing a face, hard nipples, a wet, quivering slit to materialize, as they try to believe that these bits of women were made for them and that they're the only ones who know how to get them off, the only Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Nelly Arcan New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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