The Sextine Chapel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The delightful and daring English-language debut of French author Hervé le Tellier is a series of short, intimately interconnected stories making up a lively user's manual to pleasure, relating the various liaisons of couples from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach (taking in Chloe and Xavier along the way, as well as twenty others, as you may have guessed), until the criss-crossing of their lives and partners makes up a pattern as intricate as the fresco on the ceiling of a chapel . . .
Harkening back to another playful book on an intimate subject—Harry Mathews's Singular Pleasures—Hervé le Tellier's The Sextine Chapel celebrates the wonderful, often random, often excruciating possibilities of sexual intimacy, with something here for just about everyone—and their wife, husband, lover, or passing fancy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this clever literary bonbon, 26 characters get it on in 78 vignettes, ranging from the banal to the raunchy. Each sexual encounter is described in a short paragraph, followed by a glimpse into the thoughts of one of the partners. Their exploits, when plotted onto a diagram (as shown by Le Tellier in the final pages) form a pattern that is supposedly worthy of a chapel's interior. At its best, Le Tellier's English-language debut seduces the reader with its wry wit: " Oh look! The spires of Chartres Cathedral!' and its competing erections immediately make his go limp." But the humor can be limp too: "Where had Elvire read that pornographic films multiply by four hundred the number of asses you see in a lifetime? Yes, but, she thinks, 63% of statistics are false." As in life, in this unusual book, the problem is not the sex itself, but the commentary that follows.
