Story of the Eye » (1st City Lights ed)

Dovid Bergelson, one of the most renowned and influential writers of the 1900s, was born in Ocrimovo, Ukraine, in 1884. In 1952, at the age of 68, after four years of prison, he died a victim of Stalin's police. His work as a writer and literary man spans a period of approximately thirty years.

In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which he developed in later work.

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The main thing to keep in mind is that The Story of the Eye was written in France at the height of the Surrealist movement. As such, it addresses the most cherished of Gallic intellectual concerns. The forbidden vs. Catholicism. Bourgeois behavior vs. primitive passion. Even that old saw about faith and redemption (as opposed to good clean sin) gets a workout. Yet never, ever does it become pedantic.

Maybe it's because there seems to be something truly sincere about it all. Or maybe it's because the action comes fast and furious around the soliloquies. While the author's intent might have been to draw the line between the eye (sight/knowledge) and the groin (passion/feeling), the result is a damn hot read -- not only in the "one-handed sense," but also in the classic intellectual tradition. Images and metaphors leap out at you like the lightning crack of ejaculation, when you squeeze your eyes closed and see geometric shapes, all spiderwebbery and gleaming.