Volume 56, Number 10 · June 11, 2009
Madame Butterfly's Brothel
By Colin Thubron
The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters
by Richard Bernstein
Knopf, 325 pp., $27.95
In a celebrated passage from his Carnets de Voyage, Gustave Flaubert recorded an erotic night he spent with an Egyptian courtesan. Pervaded by his characteristic conflation of the sordid with the refined, it is a complex account. In his fastidiously clinical prose, he seems to be watching himself having sex, reveling in its untroubled carnality, and indulging a night-long reverie around a woman whose speech and song he does not understand.
Review, 3252 words
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