The Sexual Life of Catherine M. [Anglais] [Broché]

A publishing sensation upon its original publication in France, Catherine Millet’s The Sexual Life of Catherine M is one of the most sexually explicit books ever written by a woman. Ostensibly a semi-autobiographical account of the sexual life of the author, the editor of an influential Parisian art magazine, the book is a frank and detailed account of Millet’s development from an awkward, guilt-ridden Catholic teenager to sophisticated Parisian intellectual and enthusiastic member of the singles bars, orgies and public sex spaces of Paris.

The book has no sequential narrative. Instead, it offers a frank and extremely graphic celebration of the pursuit and gratification of sex. Millet praises the virtues of anonymous sex, admitting that "I can account for forty-nine men whose sexual organs have penetrated mine and to whom I can attribute a name or, at least, in a few cases, an identity. But I cannot put a number on those that blur into anonymity". Nevertheless, she proceeds to offer page after page of exhausting descriptions of sexual couplings in groups in houses, car parks, offices, toilets, museums--the list and the permutations are endless, as are Millet’s descriptions of her own sexual organs and her ability to perform oral sex. Millet wants to celebrate the personal freedom and physical pleasure that casual, anonymous sex offers a woman, but this is never fully explored beyond her assertion that "the certainty that I could have sexual relations in any situation with any willing party" was "the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of the pier". Much of the book’s language is equally prosaic. Ultimately, this is a book about sexual fantasy, but as Millet herself admits, "sexual fantasies are far too personal for them ever really to be shared". Millet is too busy describing the literal nuts and bolts, the grunts and bumps of (resolutely heterosexual) sex to produce eroticism on a par with her obvious models, Pauline Reage’s Story of O and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which leaves The Sexual Life of Catherine M feeling rather naughty, but strangely dated.--Jerry Brotton --Ce texte fait référence à lédition Broché .

Millet, art critic and editor of Art Press, has become a literary sensation in France with the publication of this graphic memoir of some 30 years of her sexual adventures. Millet's "gift for observation" and her "solid superego" are as useful in her career as an art critic as they are in her erotic explorations: her ability to concentrate and observe puts her inside "other people's skins." Comparisons have been made to The Story Of O, but Millet is more in the tradition of Jean Genet and Violette Leduc, whose descriptions of their sexual encounters were not meant to titillate so much as to explore the meaning of the erotic. Millet's "quest for the sexual grail" takes her to group orgies, gang bangs in French parks and other serial sex escapades. Before long, the sex begins to seem utterly routine, in spite of the elaborate staging. Millet and her readers are then free to consider more closely some questions she raises: how oral sex compares to vaginal intercourse; why sex in disgusting circumstances is not about "self-abasement," but raising oneself "above all prejudice"; or why solitary sex is more pleasurable for her than sex with a partner. Toward the end of this curiously graceful memoir, Millet comes close to explaining her need for all this sex: only by sloughing off the "mechanical body" she'd been born with could she experience actual sexual pleasure. While women readers will find much of interest, male readers may have to overcome a certain emperor's new clothes-type discomfort, as they realize that Millet may know more about the male body than they do.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In this steamy work, a best seller throughout Europe, the editor of France's Art Press shatters gender assumptions by detailing her rollicking sex life.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

In this delightfully unabashed memoir, Millet interweaves the erotic and the philosophical while recounting her sexual escapades. She reflects on the difference between intimacy and privacy, the interaction between physical space and mental space, the role of fantasy in sexuality, and the many permutations of love and desire that may arise between friends, lovers, and strangers. Neither glorifying nor criticizing the adventures of her youth, she offers detached, thoughtful discussion of her experiences, with the same care with which she might review a work of art. Touching on issues of trust, taboo, infidelity, jealousy, narcissism, marriage, anonymity, desire for affection, and sex as the expression of one's inner life, she recalls her first sexual experience, which involved several young men; orgies in which she has participated; spur-of-the-moment encounters with friends and strangers; and fantasies of becoming a high-class prostitute. Her intelligent, detailed examination of female sexuality fascinates and titillates. Readers of all persuasions about sex will derive something of value from Millet's honest, deeply personal exploration of her desires. Bonnie Johnston
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

"[Millet’s] book makes The Story of O feel as winsome as Annie Hall."

"[A] maverick...an epicure...[Her] aloof, gracefully crystalline style is as elegant as any French pornography since Sade."

Since it was first published in France, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. has become a bestseller all around the world and has been hailed as one of the most important books on sexuality to be published in decades.

Since her youth, Catherine Millet, the eminent editor of Art Press, has led an extraordinarily active and free sexual life—from al fresco encounters in Italy to a gang bang on the edge of the Bois du Boulogne to a high-class orgy at a chichi Parisian restaurant. She has taken pleasure in the indistinct darkness of a peep show booth and under the probing light of a movie camera at an orgy. And in The Sexual Life of Catherine M. she recounts it all, from tender interludes with a lover to situations where her partners were so numerous and simultaneous they became indistinguishable parts of a collective organism.

A graphic account of a life of physical gratification and a relentlessly honest look at the consequences, both liberating and otherwise, of sex stripped of sentiment, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is "truly a masterpiece of sexual exploration [that] will be a classic" (The Hartford Courant).

The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is the autobiography of a well-known Parisian art critic who likes to spend nights in the singles clubs of Paris and in the Bois de Boulogne where she has sex with a succession of anonymous men. Unlike many contemporary women writers, there is no guilt in Millet's narrative, no chronicles of use and abuse: on the contrary, she has no regrets about a life of sexual activity. Catherine Millet's writing is a subtle reflection on the boundaries of art and life and she uses her insights on the role of the body in modern art to set the scene for her multiple sexual encounters.

A phenomenal bestseller in France and in all other countries in which it has been published, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. is very much a manifesto of our times - when the sexual equality of women is a reality and where love and sex have gone their own separate ways. Like The Story of O, it is a truly shocking book that captures a decisive moment in our sexual history. --Ce texte fait référence à lédition Broché .

Catherine Millet is editor of the prestigious French art magazine Art Press. She is also the author of eight books of art criticism, including Yves Klein, Le critique d'art s'expose, and L'art contemporain en France. She lives in Paris with her husband.