Limp, literary porn for the soft-core set.
Three steamy years in the life of an insatiable, pleasure-seeking Parisian Lolita.
Racking up at least four random sexual encounters on an average day, Tasso aims to achieve her “personal marathon” of 10,000 sexual conquests, scrupulously scribbled in diary entries that make up this “international bestseller”—all with her dear grandmother’s blessing. Ravaging men like a lioness and then hastily retreating, the author sleeps her way through tour guides, obese “pachyderm”-like men, cops and scores of others. Her best friend, Sonia, offers comic relief during Tasso’s downtime, but soon, the promiscuous author is sexing her way across Europe again, thanks to the travel perks afforded by her cushy advertising job. The dark, dangerous hills of Lima, Peru, France, Barcelona—all provide a fertile environment for the ravenous Tasso to carry on the countless, spontaneous erotic encounters that she never seems to regret. Her only “golden rule” is to remain detached from these anonymous trysts, to be enjoyed on a one-time-only basis: “A repeat session with a stranger doesn’t interest me. I prefer to pick up someone else in the street.” Ultimately, real life intervenes, stagnating much of the second half of Tasso’s formerly vigorous adventures. She gets laid off (from work, that is), her beloved grandmother dies and she has an abortion, all of which serve as sobering reality checks. Working as a freelance translator barely keeps the author afloat, though an attempt to score more permanent employment leads only to an extended melodramatic affair with Jaime, the cash-strapped compulsive liar who’d first interviewed her. Turning 30, desperate times force her to become a prostitute at a brothel, a job that provides easy money, though the demeaning, aggressive customers and a malicious “boss” eventually take their toll. And then love rescues the happy hooker. Amazingly, the worst physical malady Tasso contracts is gastroenteritis. Though written in deceptively dulcet tones, Tasso is a drama queen, and her initially titillating thrills are deflated by her many halfhearted theatrics.
Limp, literary porn for the soft-core set.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56975-560-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amorata/Ulysses
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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