A review by leerazer
The Sextine Chapel by Hervé Le Tellier

3.0

I'm not sure if the library employee who put this work in the "similar to 50 Shades of Gray" display just did so because, "Hey, sex", or if they were knowingly being a little subversive, placing a non-erotic work of eroticism coming out of the French intellectualist movement of Oulipo in amidst all the sexual rabble. The latter would be fun.

Anyway, it's an amusing enough little divertisement, each page a very brief lighthearted sketch of a different couple's sexual encounter, the persons involved coming out of a limited pool of characters so that when all the couplings are graphed out you produce a couple of geometric patterns.

Thus form is the main thing and point, as is the Oulipo wont, while the writing is casually amusing, though nothing terribly special. The best chuckle for me:

Sofia and Dennis.
The memory of a scene in the film The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by Bob Rafelson, in which Frank (Jack Nicholson) takes Cora (Jessica Lange) on the kitchen table, is clearly stimulating Dennis while he sodomizes Sofia on just that same item of furniture. Sofia, for whom sodomy is exciting but not quite orgasmic, is rubbing her clitoris faster and faster. The bottle of olive oil is marked "Cold-Pressed Extra Virgin," but that's irrelevant.

It occurs to Dennis that if he were a praying mantis, his female would now turn round and devour his head. He shivers.