Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Definately worth a read, 9 Jan 2006
Story of the Eye is not so much an erotic text, as an exploration on what it is that drives every human- desire. Desire to live, breath eat, make love, our lives revolve around it, and if there was no desire we would not be alive.It is a mistake to have Batailles novella down as an erotic fiction- it is so much more than that. He exorcises his demons through eroticism at its highest level, in order to find a release, or death, of that wanting, which can never be resolved. It is an important read, and whatever it is you take away from it, it will be something important.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
dirty literary masterpiece, 5 Jul 2005
By A Customer
If you're thinking plot and characterization, you're missing the point. This is modernism all the way: vignettes with their own individual logic which do thread together, but not in the way of an epic which builds and smooths out contradictions. It works perfectly as an erotic text because it illuminates the way desire catches on the tiniest of details, magnifying each beyond the reach of rational discourse. It moves skilfully, evading the capture of novelistic conventions, denying a too easy satisfaction. It's precisely these qualities which make it great erotic writing; it allows the reader to engage their own desires in the gaps which a lesser novel would be tempted to fill in. It's not there to be understood, it's to be revelled in!
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
fun and educational, 11 Feb 2006
By A Customer
Bataille's novel is a book about which one can argue endlessly whether it is pornographic or art or both. This is the point. It is easy to see how one can dismiss the novel as smut. However, in order to really understand the metaphorical language and the connection of themes within the novel one must dwell in Sontag's and Barthes' essays (incorporated within the book) that may change one's perspective about the graphic but beautifully written content of the book. In fact, the essays form an integral piece to understand contemporary French writing. To push it to the extreme, talking about it is philosophising. The story of the eye offers to both camps: those that want to have a quick mesmerising read and those who are interested in understanding a modern continental perspective on a philosophy of art.
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