Volume 6, Number 6 · April 14, 1966
O Dear
By Pearl Chang
Story of O
by Pauline Réage, translated by Sabine d'Estrée
Grove, 199 pp., $6.00
All the apparatus of pornography is here—whips, chains, leather goods of many kinds, dungeons, costumes including masks, gowns that roll up in back like window shades, breakaway trousers, gags, and even a few items which are not in the traditional inventory. Poor O, the heroine, is beaten, branded, and punctured, exposed to every possible view, hideously violated, but for all this, Story of O is a little off center as a pornographic novel. Except for a stirring passage or two—the famous taxi ride, for instance, with which the novel begins—tumescence seems not to be the central issue, and may not be the issue at all. Rather, one is struck by an atmosphere of prestidigitation, of double and triple meanings that suggest an elaborate literary joke or riddle which extends even to the question of O's authorship. Pauline Réage, except as author of the present book and of the preface to another, seems not otherwise to exist: None of her admirers claims to have met her, she has not been seen in Parisian literary circles, and it has been said that she is actually a committee of literary farceurs, sworn to guard their separate identities, like the pseudonymous authors of a revolutionary manifesto.
Review, 1884 words
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