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A review by small__fry
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
3.5
I hated this when I first read it, but have enjoyed it more as a cultural object than the actual text itself which increased my fondness for it over time as I thought about it.
The prose is really mixed for me. Sometimes there are beautiful and ponderous descriptions of death and the universe. Sometimes, someone is just pissing on a corpse. Isn't that life, really?
What I didn't love is that the scenes had a very "and then they did this and then they did this" pacing that is so prominent in bad sex scenes.
What The Story of the Eye gets right is that it is at times laugh-out-loud funny with the absurdity of the story, particularly with how rapidly it escalates. The exclamations of one-dimensional characters often got a chuckle out of me ("Milk for the pussy!", etc.), which I guess is always a positive sign in a novel.
Much like LaRocca's Things have gotten worse since we last spoke, I feel I would have enjoyed this more if I read it as a teenager. In a post Blowfly Girl world, its hard to feel the transgressive punches this book throws quite in the same way.
I have a lot of respect for the real pioneering freaks of literature, so have to give it some props for its enduring cultural notoriety 100 years on.
The prose is really mixed for me. Sometimes there are beautiful and ponderous descriptions of death and the universe. Sometimes, someone is just pissing on a corpse. Isn't that life, really?
What I didn't love is that the scenes had a very "and then they did this and then they did this" pacing that is so prominent in bad sex scenes.
What The Story of the Eye gets right is that it is at times laugh-out-loud funny with the absurdity of the story, particularly with how rapidly it escalates. The exclamations of one-dimensional characters often got a chuckle out of me ("Milk for the pussy!", etc.), which I guess is always a positive sign in a novel.
Much like LaRocca's Things have gotten worse since we last spoke, I feel I would have enjoyed this more if I read it as a teenager. In a post Blowfly Girl world, its hard to feel the transgressive punches this book throws quite in the same way.
I have a lot of respect for the real pioneering freaks of literature, so have to give it some props for its enduring cultural notoriety 100 years on.