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A review by casparb
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
3.0
An infamous text here. I suppose the easiest comparison for me to make is Burroughs' Naked Lunch, though I do think I prefer Story of the Eye. All the same, it's a difficult read: a literary aristocrats joke, constantly reinventing its own audacity, searching for the next taboo to trample on. Story of the Eye is at least a story, unlike Burroughs, and for that I commend it. I didn't not enjoy this text, I'm just not certain that I got a whole lot out of it.
This is an entirely negligible point for just about everybody but there seems to be a strong link between this and Un Chien Andalou, which was released a year later. In one scene, Simone links associationally an eye - a razor - a calf - a calf's eye. This is quite uncanny to me.
I ought to also mention that I read Bataille's second published work, the spectacularly titled 'Solar Anus', which I enjoyed a great deal more than Story of the Eye. The Solar Anus was a fascinating and original Surrealist text which I have only neglected to list here as a separate book due to its brevity.
Anyway, I think it's impossible for me to earnestly recommend the Story of the Eye to anybody but the most intrepid. It never stops.
This is an entirely negligible point for just about everybody but there seems to be a strong link between this and Un Chien Andalou, which was released a year later. In one scene, Simone links associationally an eye - a razor - a calf - a calf's eye. This is quite uncanny to me.
I ought to also mention that I read Bataille's second published work, the spectacularly titled 'Solar Anus', which I enjoyed a great deal more than Story of the Eye. The Solar Anus was a fascinating and original Surrealist text which I have only neglected to list here as a separate book due to its brevity.
Anyway, I think it's impossible for me to earnestly recommend the Story of the Eye to anybody but the most intrepid. It never stops.