Probably the best piece of erotica I've read so far.

Grab an egg salad sandwich and a warm glass of apple juice, we’re reading The Story of the Eye.

I went into this blind (no pun intended) and was struck right in the gut almost immediately.

This is erotica, but it’s not erotica.
This is smutty, but it’s not smut.
This is horrible, but it’s not horror.
This is depravity, nihilism and existentialism as a vehicle of these themes, but it says something deeper.
You should be grossed out.
You should be disturbed.
You should feel ashamed that you wanted to know what happened next.

But also:
“There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.” - Goethe

2024 favourites in no particular order

#14 George Bataille - ‘Story of the Eye’ (1928)

Two lovers find a terrifying brand of ecstasy on a journey of erotic excess.

Reading it cover-to-cover really felt like a reset; apparently Bataille believed that literature was the direct descendent of sacrificial religion.

‘Story of the Eye’ has a total disregard for taste that is, in its own way, earnest. Some of the sentences are astoundingly beautiful, blissful, ecstatic, but the story lives so far away from those sentiments that poetic expression likes to attract. Like here: “My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.” Is that not beautiful while rejecting everything but dirt?

Everything that this book is, it is the most base example of; reading it felt like going right to the end of the line.

Fascinating, disgusting, and certainly very disturbing. I read this novel after stumbling upon Jonathan Boulter's essay, The Negative Way of Trauma: Georges Bataille's "Story of the Eye", which I found deeply interesting and compelling. So, of course, I had to read the source material. I can't say I enjoyed the story, but I found it oddly charming when thinking of it as Bataille's examination of violence, anguish, and trauma. Overall, it was a fascinating read, though I wouldn't, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone close to me.

For me, this was a book I read to say I had read it. I had discussed this book (and joked about its vulgarity) with friends before, and had even thumbed through it, but had never taken it cover-to-cover. The author admits at the end that this was an exercise, and tries to determine what real-life events in his life might have inspired the depraved, explicit, and pornographic events in the short tale.

I can see a different class of folks taking this seriously, and perhaps taking pleasure in the acts described in the book. I read it more as something put down on paper by a writer determined to see where the visceral, base, animalistic side of his hand took him. For sure, there is joke fodder here.

I recommend giving this as a Christmas gift - with a disclaimer.

Tenía rato que no leía erotismo wuuuuu, no es para estómagos sensibles, así que léanlo bajo su propio riesgo.

Mi gordo Sade estaría orgulloso

2.3.24 Reread

To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes.

A golden shower of ideas and images. Ever since society suicided Van Gogh, there’s a subversion afoot. Easing our estrangement, we leer—especially as young people act amok.

I first read this relatively young and had pledged to return to it thirty years later. It does run on titillation but there’s a beauty however saturnine in the urine.

Everything is put into context by Batailles reflection at the end. It gives the perverse and disturbed erotic deviation shaping the novel a sad, fascinating and (dare I say it) beautiful twist.