Publication Date:April 2003 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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ISBN13: 9780802139863
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Condition: New
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Product Description 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 lifefrom 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).
Minor earthquakeMarch 29, 2010 David Van Elslande(Belgium) 0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I think I need to be able to identify to the main character of a book to fully enjoy one, and in this case
Catherine M's (perception of) sexuality was too different from my own too really get captivated by it.
Still is probably the most detailed "sexual autobiography" I'll ever get to read. I wish on top of the introspection there had been a more solid theoretical/psychological approach to her (wild/free) sex life and less "question marks" (there's many attempts to analyze her way of life, emotions, relation to her own body and others', places,..., through her own subjectivity and life events, whereas reading it through the prism of some more "official" theories would have been more educative).
The book is about 200 pages, half of them (?) being raw description of sexual acts..it left me with a taste of "unfinished business"...but maybe that's a propriety of sex itself...still, as any "minor earthquake" in litterature, it provides a lot to discuss once the last page has been turned.
Worth a readJuly 20, 2008 Ginger Lily(San Antonio, TX) 3 out of 4 found this review helpful
I thought this was an interesting read, though it gets a little dry and to be honest I read it in parts. The narrative structure is loose and that makes it a little bit difficult to read, as she just tends to skip around and some of the wording is hard to wade through, but I think that has a lot to do with the translation and not how she writes. I hope. I took a star off for the poor editing.
I liked her cool impersonal style. She doesn't proselytize and pretty much tells it like it is giving a rundown on the men she was with and some of the ways. I don't believe she was trying to be titillating and that shows. I also think that's what a lot of people expected and are put off by the book cause it runs a little too sterile for their tastes.
I do think she gave a pretty good explanation for her philosophical approach to sex, contrary to what other reviewers here stated. I just think they are used to the typical angst towards sex and sexuality that you find a lot in American books. None of that here and how refreshing it is!
There is a lot of repetition though and I have to warn you that it does get a little boring reading about one orgy after another done in such a detached style. But again I loved the unapologetic, free approach to men and her sexuality that she had and her philosophy towards sex was interesting in and of itself.
More than maybe you want to know--but then again maybe not...May 31, 2008 Mark Nadja(New York City) 3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Book-length accounts of one's real-life sexual exploits always run the risk of being insipid, monotonous, and just plain boring. After all, how many times can you describe the act circumscribed by the limitations of a non-fictional human body, especially when you confine yourself primarily to describing yourself as the focal point of the action.
For the most part, Catherine Millet avoids the peril of this sort of writing not so much by the variety of her sexual proclivities--aside from a stupendous and indiscriminate promiscuity bordering, if not altogether crossing over into nymphomania, she's pretty vanilla--as by the super-lucid intellectual precision with which she analyses the physical, mental, and emotional ramifications of her sexuality.
Despite its subject, this is not a titillating read; the matter-of-fact nature of the writing matches what strikes me as the author's straightforward, almost typically "masculine" approach to getting it on. ((Millet is, by her own admission, relatively uninterested in seduction and prefers to move straight to the main event.)) That being so, one might suppose that, if not erotic, the primary value of this book would reside in how it illuminates some general truths about human sexuality--in this case, female sexuality. But how much can a woman--or a human being, for that matter--who lays on a car hood in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night and allows herself to be taken by ten, twenty, thirty, she loses track of the number, of guys have in common with even the most uncommon of common women? As a work of human sexual archaeology, *The Sexual Life of Catherine M.* thus fails to enlighten us very much about human sexuality in general; it becomes, instead, a sort of believe-it-or-not account of what might reasonably be called one particular woman's sexual pathology.
And yet, one might still, and easily, find something of oneself in these pages for Millet is so brutally, clinically honest and so unsparing of detail that she doesn't flinch from even the most hushed-over aspects of monkeying around. There are also passages and reflections of a philosophical depth and subtlety, such as when Millet writes of wishing she could wake in a strange bed every morning to revel in the novelty of a new perspective on life. Behind Millet's compulsive and voracious carnal appetite, there is a drive to experience everything--and everyone--a desire as admirable as it is unfulfillable given the limitations of our mortal flesh.
Reflections such as these raise *The Sexual Life of Catherine M.* above the level of the merely lurid into the realm of soul-searching mediation on life in general and our finitude in the face of infinity.
While many will no doubt file this book under "Way Too Much Information," Millet is actually talking about a good deal more than what she seems to be at first glance--she is using sexuality the way the artists she chronicles as an art critic use art: as a means to understand self and world. We don't complain, but rather admire, an artist who takes risks and their art to extremes: perhaps we should likewise admire a woman like Millet.
*The Sexual Life of Catherine M.* is probably one of those books that someone had to write. If nothing else, Millet has done us this service.
An honest account of a woman's self realization in pleasureJanuary 9, 2008 Aparato SuperSonico(Orlando, FL) 4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Catherine Millet's sexual development autobiography is a must-read for all women in the United States who've ever had "dirty thoughts" but failed to act on them for fear of society's labels. This is Millet's true life account of her self discovery, pains and many pleasures that may not ring kosher with US audiences, but should be read by all women as an honest account of a woman's sexual desires and dreams. Tp hell with chopra and "venus and mars" books! This is the real deal! Vive La France!!!
an ocular spectacleNovember 16, 2007 Case Quarter(CT USA) 4 out of 5 found this review helpful
this book is divided into 4 sections. the first section, entitled numbers,describes the numerous, numberless, men with whom catherine has sexual activities in groups, small groups at first, later orgies, the largest about 150 participants.
the aggregates done with she moves on to her second section, space, sexual activities outdoors, often while positioned to scan bucolic landscapes. millet writes of pictorial works and how they are 'said to inhabit the cusp between imaginary space and the space we live in, be they barnett newman's vast colored expanses (newman himself said: i declare space), the radiant blues in the work of yves klein (who called himself the 'painter of space') or even alain jacquet's topological surfaces and objects which juxtapose paradoxical abysses. what characterizes these works is not the fact that they open space up, but that they both open and seal it again'.
from her inner and outer open space, she proceeds to her third section, confined space. confined space isn't just a room or an elevator or a place, confined space, for millet, is having sexual activities while ill, sexual activities in dirty places, with unclean persons, and acts considered taboo, a few of them, but not many, she would not do.
in confined space, jacques, catherine's husband, makes his entrance with his camera, and it's back to open spaces where he frames her in the confined space framed by the camera.
in the concluding section, details, millet reflects on forms of objectivism, with observations of her shyness, rigidity after orgasm, her body as willing surface as represented in memory and filmed by a video camera.
so there it is, her sexual life through number to canvas to camera to video camera. these days her sexual experiences are reflected by a steady stream of women attracted, for whatever reasons, to act in porn, and women who use online chatrooms. with objectification there is no voice. that's the difference with millet, she voices her interior world, her mental activity, as well as describing in detail, sexual acts and the female orgasm.
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