Tag Archives: sex

Postcard from my bookshelf #9

September 15, 2017 By in Postcards from my bookshelf Tags: , , , , , , 5 Comments

This month, the random-number generator led me to an intriguing comment. It was posted back in January by Rachel Unklesbay and went as follows:

I’ve just started your challenge to read a book from every country (not in a year, though. I have a toddler. I’m giving myself more time than that.) I love the idea of getting to know different peoples through their literature!

I would love to receive a book – or just recommendations. I sometimes struggle to find books that aren’t overtly sexual – I’m okay with some sex, but nothing pornographic – and sometimes authors try to make their books “edgy” and only succeed in making them really awkward. Is this something I just have to get over? Is this a worldwide trend, or just something Americans do to try to look grown-up?

Rachel’s words posed me something of a head-scratcher. After all, I have no way of knowing what counts as ‘overtly sexual’ in her eyes or whether our definitions of ‘pornographic’ match. Among many things, reading the world has taught me that people can have very different thresholds when it comes to a whole range of sensitive issues and if you attempt to second-guess someone’s sensibilities you can often end up extremely wide of the mark.

It’s a dilemma I’ve encountered many times over the last five years. One of the most common queries I receive is from people – often teachers – asking whether the books on the list are suitable for children of certain ages.

I’m sure they find my replies frustratingly vague, but the truth is I can’t answer definitively as I do not know what they would deem acceptable. Apart from the fact that individual children vary hugely in what they are capable of appreciating, there is the problem that what I consider harmless might be beyond the pale for my correspondents and visa versa.

It’s a point that was neatly illustrated when I looked into Chinese children’s literature and chose the award-winning Bronze and Sunflower by Cao Wenxuan (translated by Helen Wang) as my Book of the month back in April 2015. According to Wang and several other translators I’ve been in touch with, it can often be challenging to find Chinese children’s books that will work in the anglophone market because standards are so different: while Chinese stories can often seem rather simplistic and old-fashioned about things like gender roles, they can also be far more violent and graphic than is usual in English-language works aimed at similar age groups.

However, one thing I could very much identify with in Rachel’s comment was her comment about sex coming across as awkward in a lot of the titles she’s tried. That’s certainly an issue as far as British writers are concerned. Indeed, so much terrible writing about physical intimacy is published each year in my home country that the Literary Review magazine even runs an annual Bad Sex in Fiction award.

I can’t say for sure whether this is a problem exclusive to English-language writers, although it’s certainly true that my international reading has introduced me to some of the best writing about sex that I have ever encountered (indeed, my post on the book I read for Guyana, which I naively titled ‘Guyana: sex and how to do it’ unintentionally brought a lot of people using dubious, sex-tourism-related search terms to my blog – but that’s another story).

Still, I wanted to choose a book that Rachel would be likely to enjoy and so didn’t want to run the risk of selecting something that she would find too explicit.

Instead, I’ve opted for a book that, while it might appear overtly sexual, is in fact far from it. The novel in question is The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris by Leïla Marouane (translated by Alison Anderson), which was my pick for Algeria.

As I wrote in my 2012 review, its provocative title made for some awkward moments on public transport – and was a neat demonstration of the old adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’.

Witty, inventive and beautifully written, this is a treat of a novel. Rachel, I hope you like it!

 

Brazil: Goethe the ‘dirty old man’

March 24, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 36 Comments

From one Portuguese-language country with very few novels available in translation we jump to another that has a whole heap of them (by British standards, at least).

With so many exciting recommendations on the list, Brazil was a tough choice. In the end, I plumped for House of the Fortunate Buddhas because of the intriguing circumstances of its inception: Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro was commissioned to write one in a series of books inspired by the seven deadly sins. I was curious to see whether a novel written to order in such a way would turn out to be any good. And I wanted to see how Ribeiro handled the vice he chose to write about: lust.

As with the other Dalkey Archive book I’ve read so far this year (Francois Emmanuel’s Invitation to a Voyage), voice is this novel’s driving force. Prompted to record her story by a terminal illness, Ribeiro’s fearless narrator, a self-confessed ‘queen of lectures’, recalls her heyday in the 1940s and 50s. She focuses on her and her friends’ many and varied sexual exploits ‘at a time when everything was more difficult for women’, attacking the social mores that straitjacket desire and force people to ‘live according to rules and patterns for which no human was made’.

This disarming frankness extends to literary conventions too. Unafraid to share her opinions on any subject, the narrator weighs into many of academia’s leading lights, calling Lacan’s work ‘con games’, Goethe ‘a real fucker who died a dirty old man’ and Freud ‘the greatest waste of genius since Plato, the son of a bitch’.

Similarly forthright about her own blindspots and limitations, she questions her own utterances and literary skill with urgency and humour. ‘This testimony isn’t a novel, it doesn’t even have a plot – although the novels of Henry James barely had one, now that I think about it,’ she says at one point.

This unflinching engagement with the world and her place in it, enables the narrator to venture confidently where others fear to tread. The narrative is filled with exceedingly graphic accounts of sex in all its forms, which succeed because they are free from the coyness amd awkwardness that send other writers fumbling for euphemisms and clichés.

Ribeiro’s ability to inhabit the female universe is impressive. The voice is powerful, believable and peppered with details that will have many women nodding wryly in recognition. Only occasionally did I find some of the claims about the power dynamics between the sexes hard to swallow and sense a slight Tiresian wistfulness in the descriptions of men as ‘poor machos chained to a bunch of strange expectations’.

In general, this is an engrossing and persuasive performance by a leading writer on the world literary stage. With its narrator’s bold depiction of her – perhaps Utopian – vision for ‘a world of sex without problems’, it brims with generosity, fellow-feeling and a desire to improve the lot  of humankind. The issue, it suggests, may not lie with the unbridled expression of sexual desire, but with the concept of sin itself.

Perhaps this is simply the passionate manifesto for free love it appears to be. Or maybe, on some ‘con game’, Lacanian or Freudian level, the artist Ribeiro is protesting that the basis of his commission is ultimately flawed.

House of the Fortunate Buddhas by Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro (translated from the Portuguese by Clifford E Landers). Dalkey Archive Press, 2011

Guyana: sex and how to do it

February 5, 2012 By in South America, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 6 Comments

 

I wrote in my last post about the difficulties many authors have describing sex. However it’s by no means true of all. And you’d be hard pushed to find an example of how to (erhem) do it well than Buxton Spice by Oonya Kempadoo.

Set in the fictional coastal village of Tamarind Grove in 1970’s Guyana, the novel charts the sexual, social and political awakening of a young girl, Lula. As she observes the complex, painful and mysterious relationships of the people around her — and begins to have experiences of her own — Lula tests the boundaries of her identity and growing awareness of the hidden mechanisms of the world.

Sex is graphically and variously present in the narrative, with teen fumblings, lesbian encounters, rape and voyeurism all playing a part. What makes it compelling is the freshness and vitality of Kempadoo’s language — utterly devoid of the clumsy clichés and euphemisms that make most sex scenes so excruciating — and the way she uses the physical acts to map the shifting power dynamics between her characters.

Less successful is the overall narrative structure, which rambles between fragments of experience, roping in an unnecessarily large cast of characters. Kempadoo pulls this together to some extent at the end, but the softness of focus niggles. At times, reading the book feels a bit like watching a Polaroid develop only to find that the picture was blurred all along.

In the finish, though, Kempadoo’s poetic vision and her fizzing Creole keep the pages turning. She uses these to deliver a portrait of lost childhood that is at once universal and steeped in a very particular time and place. And if you’ve ever wondered what uses two teenage girls can come up with for a battery, the answers are right here…

Incidentally, my decision to categorise Oonya Kempadoo as a Guyanese novelist is slightly controversial. Although Kempadoo was born of Guyanese parents, raised in Guyana and still holds citizenship (alongside citizenship for several other countries), she identifies as Grenadian.

I changed the book to my Grenada entry for a while because of this, but on reading Buxton Spice I felt that it was so rooted in Guyana and drew so strongly on Kempadoo’s childhood there that it would be wrong to classify it as anything other than Guyanese literature.

I’m ready to be persuaded otherwise though, so if you have different thoughts on what constitutes a book’s national identity please let me know.

Buxton Spice by Oonya Kempadoo (original language: English/Creole). Publisher: Phoenix (1998)