Dead End
Michel Surya
2023 · 1 review
Others: PositiveTranslated from the French with afterword by Kit Schluter. Foreword by Amandine André. DEAD END is a sinuous pornographic work that forms a part of Michel Surya's series of erotic books released in France over the past four decades. Drafted around 1985, rediscovered among the author's papers in 2004, and revised in 2006, DEAD END speaks with the cerebral starkness of a vanitas painting. Here, the limits of excess themselves are stifling, erotic immoderation no longer satisfies, and worldly anguish reveals itself as ever crueler, more evident. Developing a genre unto itself which might be termed "neurotica," this flood of language--rawer with every unpunctuated breath--affirms and reaffirms the fear that we are beyond salvation. As full of vertiginous bravado and self-loathing as it is of sensual generosity and the genuine search for mutual pleasure, DEAD END's address of the beloved unspools with the devastating, nearly religious force of total confession. This translation by Kit Schluter, featuring a foreword by French poet Amandine André, marks the debut of Surya's fiction in the English language.
Others: Overwhelmingly positive
