Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Story of the Eye
Book Review: The Story of the Eye: Joachim Neugroschel translation
Summary: 4 Stars
Just about everything you have heard about this book is true. It was realised four times. originally, in 1928 under the sobriquet "Lord Auch." Subsequent revised copies were published until the final edition, which was published posthumously in 1967. This final version is the only time that Georges Bataille appears as the author and, this final product is so radically different than the original 1928 version, Neugroschel claims that "one can justifiably speak of two distinct books".
This specific edition of the book is translated from the original, but is good enough to include the "Outline of a sequel" and Bataille's "Preface to The Story of the Eye" from Bataille's Le Petit.
While the story itself is not exactly being reviewed here, this colelction is. I give it four stars for the translation and the inclusion of the aforementioned extras. However, I really wish that Neugroschel, or City Lights Books had also included a translation the "new version" of the text (which is any version Bataille published after 1928. Indeed, if the stories are so radically different, then together these texts would contribute to a fuller understanding of what Bataille was tryign to realise in his work. The story itself barely makes one hundred pages, and it certaintly would've been a trying task to bound them together. I know such a collection exists in French form.
Really, that's my only complaint. I don't know if someone hadn't mentioned it before.
Book Review: Thought Provoking, Brilliant and Grotesque ...
Summary: 5 Stars
What causes a mind to embrace gross sexual abstractions? When does a moment of teenage reckless abandon turn into a debauched nightmare? What causes a young mind to lean towards fetishism?
Professionals have grappled with those questions for decades, and many of these and similar questions will forever remain unanswered in The Story of The Eye. And yet, even with its horrific and gruesome imagery, one cannot help but desire to know the answers. However, one must understand the human shadow with some semblance of clarity for those answers to make any sense. Georges Bataille is one philosopher who truly understands, and he does not leave us wanting. In part two of this edition, he offers some clarity as he mulls over a few of the aberrations of his own childhood - how he came to understand his own shadow and its relationship to events and images within the story itself.
While Story of The Eye chronicles the deviant sexual escapades of two young lovers, this is not what I would consider a pornographic novel, as it was originally labelled. Yes, the erotic scenes are quite intense - intense enough to make the faint of heart put the book down in order to vomit. But the erotica is not the true bite of the story. The deep emotional, psychological, and pathological attachment between the two main characters is what drives this story. Their disdain for the banal is apparent in everything they do.
The narration is surreal, slipping in an out of conscious thought and action so fluidly it's like sinking into quicksand - struggle against it and drown or remain still and experience this work as the true artistic endeavour that it is. If you dare to remain still, you certainly will not be disappointed.
Book Review: WOWZZY
Summary: 5 Stars
This has to be one of the incredible books I have ever read. Once you start reading this book you will not be able to put it down, honestly. highly recommend this.Book Review: Well-written pornography... Colorful, daring... A good read
Summary: 3 Stars
"The Story of the Eye" is a surprisingly well-written pornographic novella about the sexual awakening of three French teenagers and the extremes to which they go to explore and fulfill their fantasies. The central theme of the book is desire: how desire often manifests itself in eccentric and perverse ways, how desire for certain objects or acts have associational roots in childhood experiences that we cannot now recall and therefore remain unconscious, how desire is frequently repressed by society with sometimes tragic consequences. The book, as many here have noted, is at times shocking, but I would say a fairer characterization of it is as colorful and daring. Read it expecting to be startled or even upset by some of the events that take place, and it probably won't have any more harmful effect on you than, say, a Surrealist film by Salvador Dali such as "Un Chien Andalou" or a graphic sexual painting by Marcel Duchamps. Furthermore, the closing section of the book goes a long way toward putting the events that have been recounted in context and "bringing you down" back to reality after the horrifying, though highly stylized and symbolic, scene in the next-to-last chapter. Take the book with a grain of salt, and then dive in and try to enjoy it.Book Review: What is this?
Summary: 4 Stars
There are two ways of looking at this extraordinary book:
1. It is one of the most intensely perverse pornographic books ever written, one in which normal sexuality takes a decidedly back seat to urolagnia, necrophilia, and other conditions with Greek names. Its main distinctions are that it is highly compact, unusually well-written, tightly structured in its use of recurring imagery, and so quickly moves from titillation to excess that it distances itself from the rest of the genre.
2. It is a seminal work by a major figure in 20th-century French culture, with significant ties to surrealism, deconstructionism, and psycholanalysis. Seen in this light, its cultural ties are significant and far-reaching. Indeed, one of the most interesting parts of the book is the postlude in which Bataille comments on the connections between this early novella and traumatic incidents in his own childhood, connections that he says he was unaware of at the time of writing. In effect, therefore, he is performing psychoanalysis on himself.
The trouble is that it takes somebody with considerable knowledge of mid-twentieth-century French thought to see #2 in #1. I imagine that the notes and essays in the Penguin Classics edition would be helpful in this respect; the City Lights Press edition, while attractively produced, just gives you the text (though usefully in the first edition, which most accurately shows the book's place at the start of Bataille's career). As a cultural artifact, this probably merits 5 stars, but I just don't think that most readers will see it as that kind of masterpiece.