Story of O by Pauline Réage
My rating: 2/5 cats
i am not going to write a serious review of this book. if you want to talk about why bondage erotica is bad for women or how negation porn makes its readers complicit in the victimization of women halfway across the globe or to sip tea and talk about depersonalization or dehumanization or anything even remotely intelligent – more power to you, but this book bored me so much i don’t even care to elevate it or grant it any sort of intellectual discussion. i am really only interested in talking about why this book is boring.
i have said it before on here, but it bears repeating: despite my recent fascination with monster erotica, i personally find reading about sex boring. but even more boring than reading about sex? reading about non-sex. which is basically what this book is.
despite the lingering on the violence and the restraining, piercing, branding, whipping, the sex act itself is glossed over to the extent that at one point o has taken on several lovers, to completion, in the span of three sentences.
for example, the last line in the book:
It was only after daybreak, after all the dancers had left, that Sir Stephen and the commander, awakening Natalie who was asleep at O’s feet, helped O to her feet, led her to the middle of the courtyard, unfastened her chain and removed her mask and, laying her back upon a table, possessed her one after the other.
penthouse letters, that is not.
and it’s all like that.
But Sir Stephen’s hands pried open her loins, forced the buttocks’ portal, retreated, took her again, caressed her until she moaned.
obviously, this is intended to be a sadean experiment in impersonal and objectified sex, but more detail is given in this book to the construction of dresses than to the sex act. and that’s fine, like i said, i have no regrets at not reading about “glistening honey-pots” or “man-roots.” but at least that would have gotten a giggle out of me.
and why am i the only one reading lactation porn and wondering who is supposed to clean up after it? and reading this and completely focusing on the hygiene?? the fact that her lover will not permit her to wear underwear. fine. but then he will also not let her sit upon her dress, so no matter where she is: on a bar stool, at a restaurant, in the backseat of a public conveyance, she is always bare-assed, and bare-“bellied” directly on the seats. and that grossed me out more than any of the more violent tearing and whipping and piercing she undergoes. do you know where that barstool has been? then don’t go rubbing your open bits about on it! seriously. why would your lover/master want you to get scabies? it is contagious!
and don’t go bloodying up the good towels after a rough session of buttsecks. it’s so nasty.
this is what i took from story of o and i apologize, but i have my hang-ups same as anyone, and i just feel like a place like roissy, with all those bodily fluids squirting everywhere and all the blood all over the floor and how often do they clean those riding crops??? is all i could think about.
it is interesting that the bodice rippers chose this book to read during the height of fifty shades of grey mania. here are some pictures from the fifty shades event at my store:
seriously, do you see how many people are there?
insanity. i wasn’t able to get a good photo of the author, just the woman interviewing her, but she was there, i swear.
as you can see, female-penned BDSM erotica is insanely popular. (is that redundant??is there BDSM that is just casual and unerotic? yes! and it is this book!) and i get why this book (story of o, i do not yet understand the shades phenomenon)is a BIG DEAL because at the time, it was unprecedented that a woman would have written such a violent and debasing novel. but i read it now and i can’t help but think, “is that all??”
incidentally,this fifty shades phenomenon is out of hand. little old ladies reading bondage porn has got to be one of the signs of the end times.
but even fifty shades is having troubles:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05…
and of course i am totally anti-censorship, but if that book is as dull as this one, who’s to say that they aren’t dodging a bullet here by not being allowed to read it.
full disclosure: i read a shitty translation. i am sure manny will come out and say it is better in its original language, and of that i have no doubt. but i honestly don’t feel that i would have enjoyed it any better in french, even if my fluency in that language had not been severely compromised by years of disuse.
i read this first when i was in high school, when i thought that subversive literature would be cool. i read some de sade and i read story of the eye, and i read this, and honestly, it just bored the crap out of me. but i thought i still had my copy lying around. turns out, i did not. and i wasn’t going to buy a new copy when the bodicers chose this book because i figured, quite rightly, that i wouldn’t enjoy it any more the second time around than i had on the first. i read the introduction of the hard copy on my break at work, and i ended up borrowing a nook so’s i could read it without having to shell out the whopping 8 bucks for it. and the introduction is worth reading, if you are interested in the history of its translation:
There exists an earlier translation of O, made in Paris several years ago. I trust I shall not be accused of a corresponding lack of generosity if I say (and I am not the first, and far from the only one, to say it) that this earlier version is less a translation than an adaptation. It reads somehow as though the adapter-translator were in fact embarrassed by the work: certain parts are glossed over; whole descriptions, nonexistent in the original, are written in; and, indeed, much of the book is paraphrased rather than translated directly. As one who had read the work in French when it first appeared, and admired not only its contents but the extreme felicity of the style, what troubled me mostly about the earlier English version was its seeming disdain for this obvious style. Subsequently, I learned this translator was a man, and it seemed to me that this fact alone sufficed to explain both the embarrassment – male embarrassment manifest in his version, and also why Pauline Reage had gone out of her way to comment favorably on mine: Story of O, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who will humble herself before the work and be satisfied simply to render it, as faithfully as possible, without interpretation or unwanted elaboration. Faced with a work such as O, male pride, male superiority – however liberal the male, however much he may try to suppress them – will, I am certain, somehow intrude.
now, i don’t know about all that, but i do know that the translation i read was atrocious. it was boring. and at one point, it cuts off abruptly, and i was like “weird,” so i went to the hard copy only to find that eleven “pages” were missing in the electronic version! what the hell?
as grateful as i am that lulu press exists, because they gave semen recipes to the world, i do not think they have the best copyeditors. not only were the ELEVEN pages missing, but there were roughly a million typos, which are terribly distracting when you are trying to focus on the buttsecks. and those pages were the whole part about her and jacqueline and the command sir stephen gives o regarding jacqueline, and is kind of a big deal, plot-wise, and is followed by one of the only interesting sections in the book, where she contemplates her role in sir stephen’s orbit, and speculates upon his intent and his feelings blah blah. but stephen is such a douche, who cares, right?
but so why am i not going to go back and read the “better” translation? because that sums it up: i really don’t care. i just wanted to let everyone know that if you are interested in reading this book, DO NOT read the version on the nook or kindle or the POD lulu press one. because from what i can tell, it definitely is just an adaptation, and since you probably aren’t going to go learning french just to read this book, if you are going to read it, READ IT.
AND OH MY GOD!!!
i wrote all that part yesterday, but i didn’t post it because i wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of the text on the nook and the text in the hard copy, so i had to wait until i was at work to take notes and everything and I WAS WRONG! they are exactly the same. so this is not just an adaptation-mistranslation. this is the one that is supposed to be “good.” that réage praised.
holy hell.
this ruins my whole review, but i do not care enough to rewrite it and this may well be my worst review ever, but i don’t even care because this book bored the shit out of me TWICE and that should not be rewarded.
in more personal news, (because the rest of this review has been such intensive impersonal lit-crit, i know…) i read this on the new glow-y nook.
which is pretty cool. were i ever to buy a device for myself, i would probably buy the glow-y one because i like to read while i am walking and it is much easier to read on a nook while walking than a book because you can do it all one-handed (LGM) but the problem i was having was with night-walking, and the light-em-up feature solves all of that. i can also late-night read without the lights on. i want to read something scarrrry on it, all alone in the dark, and see what happens.
SPOOKY!!
even maggie approves:
and, no – barnes and noble is not making me say this. i actually like this thing. and if i could get one for free and get all my books on it for free like i do when i borrow one, my life would be awesome. as is, it is just mediocre. like this review. no – this review sucks. like the book.
