The Story of the I

In the creative hothouse that is UEA there is little time for anything other than feverish communion with the muse (unless you count watching the French Open live scoreboard on the internet all day) but when we return to the physical world we do occasionally get together for a bit of a talk. It was on just such an occasion a couple of days ago, after bemoaning the insularity of the British literary scene, that Vikram (winner of the Radio Netherlands Radio Books short story competition – see here – and fellow PhD student) pointed out that it wasn’t just Britain that was in trouble. In Germany the current big literary news is Charlotte Roche (you will soon be unable to believe you hadn’t heard of her because she’s on her way here) and her ‘literary pornography.’ As an ex-Bataillean, I couldn’t dismiss the idea of ‘literary pornography’ without being a king size hypocrite, but from what I’ve read this is no ‘The Story of the Eye.’ It’s first line is about hemorrhoids, and it takes in masturbation with avocado pits and other middle-brow baiting, taboo stretching material on its path to a no doubt explicit climax. Anyone who remembers Alina Reyes’ ‘The Butcher’ will know that this is not (by any means) the first time European erotic novels have been imported here with commercial intent, but, with sales over 500,000 in Germany and a bidding war in the offing, it looks like the publishers are serious this time.

Regardless of its literary worth, if her novel takes off I might have to dust off my own ‘Red Sex Army’ – a middle-brow baiting story of communist sex terrorists that I wrote during my MA at Goldsmiths. I might even serialise it on this blog if I get more than twenty readers a day…