Literary Winners

Have to some catching up to do with letting you know about recent winners of literary prizes. Petina Gappah has won the 2009 Guardian First Book Award for her short story collection An Elegy for Easterly. Claire Armistead, chair of the judges, praised the books as a:

...humane and disarmingly funny mosaic of life in Zimbabwe

You can enjoy the first lines from each story on Petina's website, and read about her feelings on winning the prize on her blog. Debut novelist Evie Wyld beat some pretty fierce competition (including Booker winner Aravind Adiga and Orange Prize winner Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) to win the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 2009. After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is :

... set in eastern Australia and tells a story of fathers and sons, their wars and the things that they will never know about each other.

PddQ8xLinAc >Louise Doughty, chair of Judges, described the novel as :

... a remarkable book. A sometimes poignant, sometimes comic story of a father and son who have so much in common but never quite connect, it is awash with fine images that linger in the mind. Wyld’s choice of subject matter is both brave and wide-ranging, from the wars in Korea and Vietnam to the back country of Eastern Australia, Wyld captures the inflections of male speech and male bonding in a way that feels both acute and realistic. Most importantly, she writes brilliantly, able to paint a picture or create a convincing encounter with a few deft, evocative strokes, in a prose style worthy of our very best writers. There is nothing 'first novelish' about this first novel. It's a fantastically mature book, never showy, a slow burn that drags the reader in.

Wyld was one of Granta's Voices of 2008, and you can catch her talking about her book on YouTube. Then there's the infamous Bad Sex Award in fiction, which I mentioned a few days back. This year it was won by Jonathan Littell. One extract from The Kindly Ones that the judges felt merited the award compares a woman's genitalia and :

a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.

But the award is all about schoolboy sniggering, suggests Oliver Marre in The Telegraph :

It is funny – and also quite satisfying – to see the winner of the Prix Goncourt tittered at like this but the fact remains that his description of sex wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t worse, say, than his description of love or violence when taken out of context.

David Hewson has a very good piece on his blog called Do We Need Sex in Fiction, which I think every potential novelist, wanting to avoid the pitfalls, should read.

Another Year of Bad Sex

Maybe Neil Gaiman got it succinctly right on Twitter a few hours ago :

Just read the Guardian Bad Sex Award contenders ... I may never write a sex scene ever again. O Roth. O Banville. Argh.

Yes, it's that time of year again when literary lust becomes fodder for fun. The Guardian has extracts from all the 2009 nominees for The Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award which you can read at your peril. But those of you of a somewhat tenderer disposition may want to ignore the link. (I started down the list earlier but had had a surfeit of fictional bonking before I made it through all the contenders, so will resume later in the interest of - ahem - research. ) My question to you is, do you really think these are examples of bad writing about sex? The Roth extract, green dildo aside (!) i though pretty intriguing and I'm off to buy the book. I didn't snigger pruriently at Banville's :

... tang of fish-slime and sawdust ... .

Theroux's : '

Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.

is a rather sweet line I can hear being taken up as a reprise by his female readers and Richard Milward's, yes, IS funny - but that is his intention surely? The usual refrain on posts of this nature on my blog - sex is very difficult to write well anyway. Postscript : And that is the point made very well in Sarah Duncan's response on The Guardian blog :

Writing about sex can be like a complicated game of Twister. You sit in front of your laptop, trying to work out where everything's going. It's worse than following the instructions for assembling flatpack furniture.

Can Women Write About Sex?

Women :

... have an agenda, they complicate sex, they make layers, it’s conditional. And they lie as well.

Kate Copstick, the new publisher of The Erotic Review stirred things upon the BBC Radio 4 Today programme (which you can listen to here) when she said that women just do not write as well as men about sex.

Kathy Lette who was also on the programme takes up the argument at The Times, and Jean Hannah Edelstein at The Guardian blog.

Anyone who thinks women can't write erotica might do best to start with Anais Nin or Collette.

Postscript :

Sometimes the beginning of a story can be enough; a potential encounter as gratifying and memorable as the consummation of flesh. Restraint as erotic as abandon; denial and delay are sensual, temporal bonds.

I loved Erica Wagner's response.

Post-post script :

Literary Saloon sees all this as a nice example of media manipulation, and it really does sound like it. Never mind, the debate is fun, even if ultimately silly. The Times has guides to writing sex scenes - a man's tips (by Ewan Morrison) and a woman's (written by the infamous Belle du Jour).

Passion on the Page

You've invested years of blood, sweat and, in my case, HB pencils in the British Library to construct your tale of deep passion and pent-up desire and now – at last – your central characters are edging towards the bedroom. At which point you start to suffer from writer's droop. How are you going to encapsulate the earth-moving wonder, the erotic arousal and tender protectiveness of the longed-for moment?

We've visited the topic several times before but Maeve Haran's piece in The Telegraph asking why is sex so hard to put into words, is well worth a read. The character she needed to plunge into the thick of the action in her latest novel The Lady and The Poet is no other than John Donne :

... perhaps the greatest erotic love poet in the English language, whose poetry glitters with clever seductiveness, carnal longing

and clearly a tough act to follow.

Secrets of the Bedroom

Fascinating! As fast as sex manuals in Malay get banned, a new crop appears and the innovative authors are using Facebook to advertise (which is how I know, 'cos it turned up on my page!) and the publishers have now moved to e-books ... embracing the hi-tech in a way other publishers in the country haven't got round to.

Well, it tells you that there must be a market, and that there a hunger for relationship education which perhaps isn't met in other ways.

One wonders too if these are the same books with just a different title and cover?

Rachels' Bad Sex

There's one literary prize no author likes to win or even be nominated for - the annual Literary Review magazine's Bad Sex In Fiction Award .... This year the dubious honour goes to Rachel Johnson (quoted above) for a passage in her novel Shire Hell. I'm sure the line about "the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo" clinched her the victory.

The author accepted the award graciously but cautioned:

The truth is that anyone who writes sex scenes has [the award] at the back of their mind ... It makes you even more self-conscious when you're lubricating your book with sex.

All the shortlisted entries are here for you to merrily chortle over. And in case you missed them, posts about the previous years' entries are archived here.

Abduction Fiction

Some of my most recent reads seem to have the theme of abducted children running through them, which seems pretty topical. (Another is Peter Carey's His Illegal Self which I also plan to share my thoughts on anon.)

Our book club chose Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita as our month's shared read, and I was very happy to re-encounter this old friend of my own adolescence. But I definitely appreciated it far more several (!) decades on.

I particularly love what Preeta calls "voicy" novels, in which we hear the voice of the main character, especially when he or she is not telling us the truth, and sometimes not even aware of their own self-deception.

Humbert Humbert, we learn right from the first page, is a murderer and the paedophile abductor of twelve-year old Dolores Haze alias :

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

The novel is his confession, written later in prison, and it is a meticulous study of obsession. And right from the start it puts the reader in a very uncomfortable position: while we know that what Humbert is doing is morally repugnant, while we are horrified by the chilling tyranny he exerts over his stepdaughter, we are disarmed by his honesty, seduced by the sensuality of the writing, and drawn into collusion with him in this most perverse of love stories. It's a very strange and unsettling sensation.

It's hard to imagine too that the book was written 50 years ago, because it seems so contemporary ... and thanks to the internet perhaps we are more aware of paedophilia now than we were back then.

I felt terribly sorry for Lolita, for although she is no innocent (having gleefully lost her virginity at a summer camp, and knowingly strung our narrator along), HH finally faces towards the end of the book the extent to which he has damaged his step-daughter. Having escaped HH's clutches, she eventually marries a war-veteran and, little more than a child herself, dies in childbirth. Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all is where HH recalls Lolita talking to a friend about death, and realising that the nature of their relationship utterly precluded being able to reach her on a deeper level.

Lolita is also an early example of the genre referred to as a road novel, and I loved the way the essence of the whole journey criss-crossing small-town America moving is so skilfully distilled into a series of vignettes.

Is Lolita porn? Well, it was certainly seen that way when Nabokov first approached American publishers, five of whom rejected it, fearing that they'd be prosecuted on obscenity charges. The language of the book though is never sexually explicit, and all the more potent and sensual for that.

This is the climax (pun of course intended) of one of the most shocking scenes :

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled on in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola, the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock …

What dazzling, what shameless writing!

Stephen Metcalf in Slate magazine (asking the question Is Lolita Still Shocking?) says :

Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book.

and certainly it changes the reader's inner landscape. Not so long ago Woolworth's stores across the UK were forced by furious parents to withdrawn the sale of beds named Lolita which had been designed for six-year-old girls.

(And Muntaj in our book club - a more respectable pillar of society you could not hope to find - said that the book had severely messed with her head and even when in the supermarket found herself weighing up which young girls HH might consider "nymphets"!)

If you haven't read Lolita yet (hey, where were you hiding?) but are considering picking it up, I'd recommend the Penguin Classics annotated version which seemed to be very helpful when I glanced at a friend's copy (especially as HH throws in a lot of words and phrases in French).

I really enjoyed the radio programmes about the book on NPR, and you can listen to the lovely Jeremy Irons reading the opening of the novel.

Lo. Lee. Ta.

Mailer's Bad Sex

Norman Mailer has posthumously won the Literary Reviews Bad Sex Award for a graphic passage from his last novel the Castle in the Forest.

We are sure he would have taken the award in good part

said the judges, while the award itself was presented at the In & Out (Naval and Military) Club in St James's, by former model Maria Helvin to the youngest of the nominees, Richard Milward.

I know you literature lovers will want to read the winning extract, so here 'tis, the account of an incestuous encounter between Hitler's parents :

Are you all right?' she cried out as he lay beside her, his breath going in and out with a rasp that sounded as terrible as the last winds of their lost children.

'All right. Yes. No,' he said. Then she was on him. She did not know if this would resuscitate him or end him, but the same spite, sharp as a needle, that had come to her after Fanni's death was in her again. Fanni had told her once what to do. So Klara turned head to foot, and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth, and took his old battering ram into her lips. Uncle was now as soft as a coil of excrement. She sucked on him nonetheless with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One - that she knew. From there, the impulse had come. So now they both had their heads at the wrong end, and the Evil One was there. He had never been so close before.

The Hound began to come to life. Right in her mouth. It surprised her. Alois had been so limp. But now he was a man again! His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety.

You can read all the runners-up on the Guardian website.

(Thanks Chet for breaking news via SMS!)

Let's Talk About Sex

Oh, why not?

Here's a column I wrote for the now defunct Chrome Magazine way back. (No-one under 18 may read this in case they are put off sex for life!):

Why is good sex such a problem?

The writing of it, I mean. For the novelist.

Because while purveyors of porn have no qualms about depicting graphic acts of bonking in full squelching detail, the task for the serious novelist is fraught with peril: badly written sex scenes can be unintentionally hilarious and as Canadian writer Sandra Martin says “Performance anxiety can lead to overwriting in an author who is trying too hard, or limpness in a writer unable to rise above self-consciousness.”

Maybe it speaks volumes about the British tendency to treat sex as a bit of a joke anyway, but the Annual Bad Sex Awards is one of London’s most glittering literary events. The prize is given to the writer who creates the most “inept, embarrassing and unnecessary” description of the sexual act published in the a particular year and was initiated by Literary Review’s Auberon Waugh. Over the years the list of contenders has come to read like a list of Who’s Who in Fiction: John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Sebastian Faulks and even the revered Salman Rushdie have made the shortlist, showing that awful writing about sex truly knows no bounds.

Let me just give you a little taster of the kind of writing that bags the award. Novelist Nicholas Royle had a character called Yasmin “making a noise somewhere between a beached seal and a police siren” while her partner Ambrose was “punching smoothly in and out of her like a sewing machine” (The Matter of the Heart 1997); David Huggins made the grade by crafting the immortal line “Liz squeaked like wet rubber” (The Big Kiss - An Arcade Mystery 1997); while Wendy Perriam writes of one of her characters: “Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr. Hughes penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin” (Tread Softly 2002)

When you’ve picked yourself up off the floor, you might like to consider the case of poor Tom Wolfe. He won last year with a scene from his latest novel I Am Charlotte:

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue. But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!"

For those not in reach of a good medical dictionary, otorhinolaryngological actually means ear, nose and throat, and like the act of snogging it depicts, the word is damned hard to get your tongue round. Not surprisingly, Wolfe was not amused by his win and did not turn up to collect the award in person, arguing that the judges had missed the irony of the piece. He hadn’t meant the scene to be at all sexy, he said. "There's nothing like a nine-syllable word to chase Eros off the premises." Quite.

Other authors have turned up to accept their embarrassing statuettes with good grace. Philip Hook who won for his second novel The Stone Breakers told a sorry tale in his acceptance speech of trying to impress a rich Frenchwoman by telling her that he had won a literary award. When she learned that the award was for bad sex, she observed dryly that there must be a great deal of competition in England for a prize like that!

If contemporary writers much feel Waugh looking disapprovingly over their shoulders as they pen a sex scene, help is at hand in the form of Elizabeth Benedict’s excellent handbook for writers: The Joy of Writing Sex. She maintains that it is the sheer ordinariness of sex which makes it so hard to write about. “It’s like describing someone eating,” she says “cutting the food, lifting it to one’s mouth. Inserting it, chewing and swallowing”. The real skill, she says, is in making the ordinary look natural and yet feel unique.

If anything, the pervasive influence of pornography seems to have put many writers off including sex scenes in their own writing. Natasha Walter writing in the Guardian suggests some of the best writers are deliberately choosing to be coy in their approach. She cites Zoë Heller’s Notes From A Scandal, a novel about a schoolteacher who has an affair with one of her students. There is of course plenty of sex in the background, but it doesn’t actually end up on the page. She says that in Brick Lane Monica Ali “gets over the antique power of adultery, with its aura of taboo” ore effectively by not touching the sex act of her adulterous character, Naznen.

But in the end, no act makes the character more vulnerable or shows the deeper dimensions of a relationship than sex in literature. When it works on the page the character’s soul and heart are as engaged in the act as body parts, and the writer’s deeper purpose is served.

Because sex in literature is always about so much more than just the sex act. Lady Chatterley’s Lover shocked many at the time of the book’s publication, but Lawrence’s aim was to show how sex has the power to spiritually unify a man and a woman. The prodigious promiscuity of Hector Castillo Oscar Hijuelos’ The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love is intended as a tribute to Cuban machismo. Alan Hollinghurst’s graphic depictions of gay sex The Line of Beauty, serve to underline his protagonist’s journey from romantic student to morally corrupt individual. The ménage a trois in Jill Paton Walsh’s dark religious fable Flight of Angels serves beautifully to illustrate her character’s philosophy that bodily joys are to be relished as much as the spiritual: it is arguably the most erotic scene in contemporary literary fiction.

Certainly, I will never look at olive oil and honey in the same way again.

(Pic nicked from Wikipedia)

If it's November, it's Time for Bad Sex

Hurray! I thought: the announcement of the longlist for my favourite literary book prize of the year: the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards.

McEwan's in with a chance of bagging this one, Michelle Pauli reports in the Guardian:

He is joined on the longlist of what the organisers call Britain's "most dreaded literary prize" by Jeanette Winterson with a passage about robotic sex from The Stone Gods; Ali Smith for Girl Meets Boy, and Gary Shteyngart with an athletic description of his crass hero from Absurdistan bedding one of his many conquests ("Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media - a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future"). ... The late Norman Mailer makes a posthumous appearance with a passage from The Castle in the Forest in which the male protagonist's "Hound" is described as "soft as a coil of excrement". More poetic bawdiness is on offer from Christopher Rush's life of Shakespeare, told in the Bard's "own words", and his maritime-themed description of coitus with Anne Hathaway, in which "I clung like a mariner to her heaving haunches, the deep keel of her backbone dipping and lifting through July, through the green surge of growth ... Our vessel ran shuddering onto the rocks, a wave of wetness ran through us, the air was rent with screams and I became aware that the bank on which we lay drenched and grounded was journey's end, love's end, the very sea-mark of our utmost sail."

Does McEwan deserve an award meant to:

... draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it...?

I'm actually feeling quite outraged that anyone should have a snigger at McEwan's expense and can only think it's a reflection of the enduring British embarrassment about things sexual.The whole point of On Chesil Beach is that he is deliberately setting out to write about sex so disastrous that it has life-time consequences. And I feel he does it very well indeed.

I can't speak about the other nominees, not having read them ... but I think that quote from Absurdistan (above) rather lovely. I don't find myself laughing at Christopher Rush's maritime imagery either. What do you think?

My favourite award and this year a sense of bewilderment ...

And the Bad Sex Award Goes to ...

... Giles Coren, who sportingly turned up to accept his prize (unlike Tom Woolfe last year).

You can read the winning passage (which includes description of a certain part of the male anatomy "leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath") here along with those of the other runners-up. Don't say I didn't warn you!

And if you wish you'd been at the award ceremony where "Filth and hilarity abounded in equal measure", you can at least read about it on the Culture Vulture blog.

Bad Sex, Good Sex

Writes Elizabeth Benedict in The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers:

… sex makes people vulnerable. And in that vulnerability, we change and we do things that surprise us. Sometimes we become cruel, sometimes we become infantile, sometimes we fall in love. And sex is very powerful. As writers we have to learn how to exploit the power of sex in our writing ...

Many writers, among them the most famous and respected, fall flat on their bums. Others use sex effectively, not only to get deep inside their characters' skins, but to underline the message of their novel.

My article in the current issue of chrome is about getting sex down to the page, so now with your appetite whetted, go buy! (And if I'm not a sufficient draw, I'm sandwiched between Dina Zaman talking about talking respectfully, and Oon Yeoh writing about Khairy Jamaluddin.)

Well, Love ... Actually

Methinks I've writ about the difficulties of putting love on the page before. Never mind.

In the course of surfing hither and thither to find material for an article, I came across a beautifully written piece by Canadian writer/performer Cass King on writing about sex and love. Sex, she says, is easy enough to write about satirically because it's a fairly ridiculous act, innit? (And she gives a delightful example vaginas making noises like whopee cushions! Well, hers might ...)

But:

Writing about love, on the other hand, is like shooting at pineapples in the dark. It is dangerous, messy, terrifying. Writing about love is wrestling with weird ghosts, ectoplasmic riots of the spirit, intoxication of the senses. Love is the Bermuda Triangle of the intellect, the place where reason lists to starboard and navigational instruments become unreliable. I'm not one to believe in love as a falling; love never seems so passive. Infatuation can be uncontrollable, but to me, true lovers are pumpers of handcarts on old-fashioned railways. Love requires effort; sweating, swaying, holding on for dear life, that is being in love.

As a cautionary note she adds:

But writing about love is thankless; it's like writing about old dogs at the pound: nobody really gives a damn about love unless it belongs to them.

The great writer is the one who can make the reader feel that that love belongs to them too. Who manages it? Neruda, Rumi, Shakespeare, de Bernieres ...

Footnote:

I spent a very happy hour getting lost in Cass' website. Check out her poetry and (if you're 18+ and not a prude!) her pieces for Organ Grinder which yes, is a sex column.

Vagina Variations

Read a very nice piece in Marita's blog about The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler. I read it a couple of years back, my copy smuggled over from Singapore. It’s banned here because of the V-word. The play was put on at a local theatre, but someone who felt that they had to role-play the act of outraged moral guardian complained, the police moved in and the show was closed down. It can’t be staged again because it won’t be given a license.

We in Malaysia are not supposed to know that vaginas exist apparently. It might corrupt us beyond all measure. If we are privy to this secret knowledge, what kind of power might this give us over our men?

Magazines from abroad are censored here. Any naked woman’s body has a neat little bikini drawn on it by the censor’s thick black pen pen. (If the sight of a naked boob can so corrupt us, the censors must be hairy werewolves hunchbacked with the weight of all that perversion they carry.)

I once bought a copy of Cosmopolitan because there was apparently a special section on how to have earth-shattering orgasms. When I got the copy home, I found that the censors had cut out the pages with the article. We’re apparently not supposed to know about orgasms either.

Even though I come from the wicked west, my own sex education at school was nothing to shout about ... could have played marriage guidance counsellor for frogs and rabbits, mind you.

But much of my sex education over the years has come from books, starting the section of my parents' medical dictionary which told you what to do on your wedding night in instruction book prose that made sex sound no more exciting than changing the washer on a tap or fixing the washing machine.

Ah, but my true sex education really began when I read Harold Robbins' The Carpet Baggers which I used to sneak off the bookshelf to go and read in the park. I can still remember the sex scenes almost word for word. ("When he saw her breasts he thought of milk and honey." Sigh.)

Fortunately, real life filled in the gaps between frogs and Robbins most pleasantly. But of course, I kept reading because you can always improve your game.

Along the way I encountered The Hite Report. Devoured it. Here were the voices of other women talking about their sex lives. I’d never, in my whole life, discussed sex with another woman. Still haven’t actually. Too shy, too embarrassed. So until I read that book, I didn’t know how other women thought about, experienced, sex. I actually cried in parts of it, particularly when I recognised myself in some of the stories.

I have the new edition of The Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort’s classic book which seems a little tame and dated. I preferred the pictures of the hairy hippies in the original line drawings anyway.

And then there’s Nancy Friday’s Women on Top, from which I learned that the XXX happenings behind my eyes were no stranger than those of other women – tamer even, give or take an Alsatian dog here and there!

Anyway, Eve Ensler’s play is a marvel and I hope I get a chance to see it performed one day. Ensler interviewed woman and used their voices in monologues which cover all aspects of women’s sexuality. I laughed at the responses to her question “If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear”?. Among the answers:

A beret
A leather jacket
Silk stockings
Mink
A pink boa
A male tuxedo

And the one I like best:

A hat full of flowers!

I cried with the elderly woman who had never even seen her vagina. “She had only touched herself when washing in the shower, but never with any conscious intention. She had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two she went into therapy, and with the encouragement of her therapist, she went home one afternoon by herself, lit some candles, played some comforting music, and discovered her vagina. She said it took her over an hour, because she was arthritic by then, but when she finally found her clitoris, she said, she cried.”

Did you know, incidentally, that the Indo-Europena word "cunt" was derived from the Indian goddess Kali's title of Kunda or Cunti and shares the same root as kin and country. Puts a new spin on patriotism, doesn't it?

Trick Lit

We've had chick lit. Now, according to Australia's The Age the latest phonomena in the publishing world appears to be what they call Trick Lit, in other words bonk-and-tell tales told by sex workers.

Should curiosity(at least!) be stirred ... you can read the original Belle de Jour here.

Tom Wolfe Gets Bad Sex Award

The Bad Sex Award is given each year by the Literary Review for the funniest, most embarrasing sex scene in a novel.

Enjoyment

Poor Tom Wolfe, I thought until I read the scene from I Am Charlotte ... and then I was in stitches:

"Slither slither slither slither went the tongue. But the hand that was what she tried to concentrate on, the hand, since it has the entire terrain of her torso to explore and not just the otorhinolaryngological caverns - oh God, it was not just at the border where the flesh of the breast joins the pectoral sheath of the chest - no, the hand was cupping her entire right - Now!"

Was an award ever so well-deserved?

André Brink (a runner-up) doesn't even come near: "[Her vulva was] like a large exotic mushroom in the fork of a tree, a little pleasure dome if ever I've seen one, where Alph the sacred river ran down to a tideless sea. No, not tideless. Her tides were convulsive, an ebb and flow that could take you very far, far back, before hurling you out, wildly and triumphantly, on a ribbed and windswept beach without end."

I'm off now to see if I can slip "otorhinolaryngological" into a conversation with someone.

(Later ...)

Have to spend some time practising it first. It's damned hard to get your tongue round. Which of course is a pun. Perhaps Wolfe was being tongue in cheek when he used the word? (Or tongue up nose, tongue down throat ...)