The Victorian imagination, a sampler Book

1.5/5
Catherine Millet lives and works comfortably in the land of intellectuals, but she went down in my estimations when declaring on French radio only last year "I really regret not having been raped, because I could show that you can recover from it", really?, what a completely idiotic thing to say!. An insult to all victims suffering with the trauma of this heinous crime. Why not go and work in a rape crisis centre for a while, before retracting those words. It's a good job these sexual escapades were kept down to under two hundred pages. Any more and I would have stopped. After the half-way point I was only semi-interested, learnt nothing new, only that she bonked like crazy. As for calling these memoirs a work of art, that's a joke. It's nothing more than a work of smut. And if there is one word I can't stand when talking of the female genitalia, or in other derogatory ways, it's the C word. It's vulgar, and gets used a hell of a lot here. Why not just be more civilized and say my vagina.


So it comes as no surprise this is a book filled to the rafters with sex, most of the time done in threes. Fifty or so pages in, it wasn't bad, but started to go down hill with it's repetitive nature. After losing her virginity at 18, she doesn't hang about, as just two weeks later was involved in her first of many partouzes (orgy), this is theme that carries on for most of the book, she is one for multiple partners that's for sure. She claims to have participated in group sex where there would be up to 150 men and women present, estimating to have gone with a quarter of them, of course, it's only her word, a lot of what she harks on about maybe overly exaggerated, I doubt everything that happened here is 100% true. She also cruised the Bois de Boulogne as well, offering herself to any Tom, Dick and Harry, up for free in a place where famously, professionals were trying to earn a living. It seems men were nothing more to her than human dildos. Where is the love?. She came across as a cold person. I don't like her.

In between the moments when her private parts weren't working overtime she gets all philosophical, with references to contemporary art, metaphysical musings on the nature of perception, and aesthetic theory. But mixing the filth with intellectual talk didn't work for me, I was rapidly losing interest to even care. This is a work of self-gratification. It's dirty and lewd, but nothing new, and after the novelty wore off, I never found it sexy or erotic, was bored after 100 pages, with no emotional pull into her life what so ever. A couple of moments did result in amusement though, when she was all geared up to be taken on the bonnet of a car before a man walking a dog comes out of nowhere, leaving her sexually frustrated for all of about five minutes. And another time wondering around inside the Museum of Modern Art, she and two male accomplices take advantage of a no access door being accidentally left open, pop into a room for a quick threesome, before continuing their tour.

It's not poorly written, so a minor credit there, and her descriptions are very explicit if that's your thing, but apart from a few moments that raised the eyebrows, I can't say anything else in the way of positives. I never felt the heat rise during her sex, and with the exception of the odd chuckle, the rest was incredibly dull.