drive home the point. I’m sure I saw mention of Catherine Breillat‘s early fame as a teen pornographer, but until I saw a American paperback edition of her A Man for the Asking (aka L’Homme Facile), I couldn’t connect with how she really burst on the French scene long before her sexually frank movies did. Her first novel,published when she was sixteen or seventeen, was so explicit that she wasn’t legally of age to purchase her own writing. Yes, it was declared X-rated, adults-only by whatever censorship board existed in France in the late 1960s.
The book details the obsessive love an unnamed Don Juan has for the youthful L., written in a stream of consciousness style that repeatedly veers into prose poetry. Though lurid and frank, it’s not jackoff material. If I had to categorize it, I’d call it experimental smut. It’s often difficult to discern obsessive thought from reality in its pages because almost every sexual scenario veers between the fantasies the male protagonist envisions for the elusive L and whatever sex he’s really getting from women more willing to give it up to him. But the book has its cleverness:
“If I slept with all the guys who have a hard-on for me, I’d have a hole as big as this,” as she puts her arms around his waist…”
It has its glimpses of casual gestures replete objectifying potential:
“The girl dances facing him, she raises her arms with their virgin armpits right oposite him;
then she hides her head in her hands and offers herself without a name, without a face: she is simply a body, a hole to come in. She dances and her legs spread, it looks like her whole body may split (the place), but he holds out and the girl drops her arms and the comeon.”
Not to mention a dash of humor as it date-stamps itself:
“They have been talking about pills (the pill) with some kind of medical student who always has two or three boxes of them in the glove compartment of his car. The fact is, the girls have been going to Geneva for a long time now so there is no need for any ovary-disarmmament conference.
His mistress reminds him that that creates equality between male and female behavior; something he is very willing to admit since this way she does not give him any trouble about pulling out before he spurts or making him put all the icecubes he was saving for his scotch into the bidet in which she flushes her spread thighs.”
A Man for the Asking was published in both hardcover and paperback editions, but as near as I can tell, it was the only novel of Breillat’s to find its way into American translation. And even though the pent-up rush to publish and sell smutty books from that era has long since faded, it remains proof positive that sex sells.
