Reviews for Emmanuelle

The average rating for Emmanuelle based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-01-08 00:00:00 Cheryl May I could easily write a cop-out, only-read-Playboy-for-the-stories type of review here. Lot of very interesting philosophical insights, perhaps a bit too much sex, that kind of thing. Fellow GoodReaders, I cannot lie to you. Nothing could in fact be further from the truth. I wolfed down the first two-thirds of this book, which consist of one juicy sex scene after another. Then she met dull, creepy, manipulative Mario, and we got started on the philosophy. I felt my eyes closing. I tried several times to read further, but I just couldn't do it. I was assailed by horrible pangs of guilt. Ms. Arsan is clearly not stupid (she originally wanted to be an astronomer - I did too!), and she writes quite well. She just happens to be much better at writing about sex than philosophy. But she seemed to have put a lot of work into the philosophy, and it was terrible that I didn't even read that part of the book. I almost thought I'd somehow taken advantage of her. Well, Emmanuelle, everyone has things they're good at and things they just wish they were good at. I understand that Bertrand Russell's Principia Sexualis was a complete flop, and that he humiliated himself further by unsuccessfully trying to sell the movie rights. He only started to recover a little when they gave him the Nobel Prize. It's possible that that story isn't literally true in every detail, but I really and truly don't want you to feel bad about this unfortunate episode. It's my fault, not yours.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-01-08 00:00:00 Cris Mooney Sometimes we just need stereotypes to be confirmed: after all is said and done, we find in conventional ideas the last staple of our decaying culture. The Thai writer Emmanuelle Arsan (actually Marayat Bibidh or Krasaesin or Virajjakkam or, for Heaven's sake, there seem to be a hundred more) became - lucky her - Madame Rollet-Andriane by marrying a French diplomat she met while still in her teens. He was 30. The happy couple moved to Bangkok soon after the ceremony... and the real fun began for both. As soon as Miss Telephone Directory became Madame R.-Andriane, the discreet charm of the 50s haute bourgeoisie swallowed her down in its receptacle of easy pleasure and glamourous lust, a world of muffled boredom and glittering sins, too high up for anybody to care about any sort of private respectability or cheap moralism: as long as careers are not affected, anything can be done and nobody is going to complain. Here's the triumphant cliché of the degenerate, parasitical, lazy, bored to death upper class... no doubt the most arousing cliché of all. Now, the novel. * Sigh * This is her first novel, the first of a long series, written in 1959 and published clandestinely in France. By 1974, when J. Jaeckin's film version was made out of the first volume, it had become a classic and a milestone in all-time erotica. The protagonist is the young and beautiful Emmanuelle, who joins her diplomat husband in Bangkok (there COULD be something self-referential here) where she's immediately introduced to the fancy élite gravitating around the French diplomacy. After a first class flight spent mostly in a stranger's arms, and this is clearly a euphemism, Emmanuelle is warmly welcomed by the female high society she now belongs to; nobody can resist her beauty, and the generous attitude with which she shares it among her new acquaintances definitely helps. She also meets Mario, a homosexual Italian expat (thanks a lot, Marayat.. that's what we needed, really) living in Bangkok, enjoying gorgeous youths and huge amounts of opium; this man, for whatever reason, takes Emmanuelle to sort of a brothel and opium den, where he hands her over to some locals (presumably on the mama-san's payroll). This is supposed to be part of the girl's education; we all wonder whether she actually needed his contribution anyway. In the meantime, Mario keeps philosophizing and giving his precious advice on eroticism and self-consciousness to his otherwise busy pupil. And then... well, that's all. From the point of view of literature, this novel is mediocre. And I'm being quite generous. The eroticism is due mostly to the bourgeois setting. I mean, the protagonist's sexual exploits are not exactly memorable. Arsan has an annoying tendency to sugarcoat what should be the mere description of sex and pleasure by the use of ridiculous metaphors and a verbal virtuosity she doesn't master at all. The writing is not too bad, but it's just not intriguing. After a decent start, the reader ends up being more interested in the description of the exotic landscape than anything else, as though shifting from a soft-core film to a National Geographic documentary. Except that this is supposed to be an erotic tale, not a Lonely Planet guidebook. The only merit of this book is the depiction of the moral climate of the high-class milieu it portrays. Let aside the dialogues, in which the shallowness is less voluntary than spontaneous, the author is good at rendering the sense of lazy abandonment of her characters; maybe it's just me, but there seem to be a gloomy atmosphere permeating the book, almost imperceptible in the blinding light of this torrid cliché. (Trivia: Sylvia Kristel is just great in the 'official' film series, but I still prefer the Venezuelan actress playing Emmanuelle in the 1993 tv series, Marcela Walerstein. Her beaverish front teeth are an absolute turn-on).