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Love is a Feast
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 14, 2021
This long out-of-print volume is the autobifography of an erotomaniac not famous for starring in seventies hard- and softcore movies, most notably Jean Rollin’s Lips of Blood, and serves as a manifesto of a life utterly devoted to fleshly pleasures above all else. Bourdon is a woman so unconstrained by stuffy bourgeois conventions, she plunges herself into frequent orgiastic encounters with practically everyone in her vicinity (on one trip to Africa she sets out to sleep with 26 men for her 26th birthday) and then later any canines in her vicinity (the lucky pooch receives doggy fellatio before intercourse), in a memoir that clearly revels in a form of performative shock. Bourdon portrays herself as a hardcore Aphrodite, spreading luscious lust as a way of shaking the world of staid squares awake, while frequently espousing iffy right-wing views and dismissing psychiatry as another societal straightjacket and coming across as a rabid egomaniac prone to inappropriate sexual assaults. The AIDS epidemic would throw a fire blanket on the sort of hypersexual world Bourdon craved (with two-hour humping breaks at work), and although her utopia is one of cum-splattered grossness, her randy audacity makes her truly a posterchild of the “liberated” 1970s woman. [P.S. The translator is the redoubtable Barbara Wright].
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May 13, 2022A shagging memoir, basically, and one which could only be from France in the seventies. Not because that was the only time people wrote books about having sex – though it was a bit of a hotbed, pun mostly intended. But also because of the tone. When I first heard about this (from another boggled review on Goodreads, as it happens) I inferred a sort of wide-eyed Barbarella tone to Bourdon's tales of fucking her way around France, and indeed the wider world, but that was completely out. No, the mood is more de haut en bas, as when, after driving up and down the road naked in response to a club complaining about their outfits, Bourdon concludes one anecdote "You may well despise these childish games, in these days of organised gloom and slobbering respectability, but personally I find them most amusing." Now, taken in isolation that could suggest a gender-swapped version of the sort of absolute arsehole who gets peeved if people 'can't take a joke' and sincerely extols the majesty of 'bantz'. But that's not quite right either. Bourdon has, it is true, a monumental and self-admitted self-regard; sometimes she's definitely self-aware about this too, as in the chapter where her long-term partner is brought in to introduce himself and she heckles throughout. But it's as much the self-regard of the French thinker as of the French shagger (not, admittedly, that the two categories have ever been mutually exclusive). The other books from the publisher advertised on this one's flaps* include Deleuze; translator Barbara Wright also worked on the likes of Robbe-Grillet. Which may be why this sometimes feels overwritten to the point of bathos: "I refused other contacts, because I scented the glaucous clumsiness of certain would-be Jacks-in-office of the cloven inlet." It's proper 'stout yeoman of the bar' territory, isn't it, just making a different one of life's pleasures sound thoroughly unappealing. Elsewhere, it's less high-flown but still comic in a way other than the one I suspect was intended: "Mirabelle was already under the table, conscientiously reawakening the ardour of Paul-Marie, who was discussing the possible devaluation of the franc with Elodie." Still, at times there are Maldoror riffs that come off, fusions of sex and satire which recall Louys, and even the occasional ecstatic hymn to excess which actually reads as such, rather than as a parody. And whatever one's quibbles with the prose style, she sounds like she had a whale of a time – and if she didn't have a whale full stop, it was probably only because of the logistical hurdles. One would hesitate to call her altogether a progressive – even the translator balks at Bourdon's romanticisation of dictatorship, and her African adventure now reads like someone inexplicably decided to do a porn parody of the white saviour complex. But elsewhere she mounts a stirring defence of things still widely misunderstood today, like the difference between sadomasochism and fascism or, more simply, the basic fact that yes, a woman can want to have lots of sex without being cajoled or paid. Wondering what the hell Bourdon could have done with herself as the world shamefacedly got its clothes back on in subsequent decades, I looked her up and learned that, among other things, she'd been involved in the competition to design the European single currency. Which, like so much to do with the EU, ended in unseemly legal wrangling, but is still far better than the sort of moralistic postscript I feared history might have added to this report from what, perhaps bizarrely, I still want to call a more innocent age.
*Still childishly amusing, even in this context.
*Still childishly amusing, even in this context.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews