“From carnal classics to modern romances” Playboy left yet another indelible mark on our literary culture with last month’s release (to coincide Book Expo America) of what it calls “The 25 sexiest novels ever written.”
To paraphrase the immortal words, most probably of some Internet editor on the Playboy site, if great literature is “thinking with someone else’s brain” then great erotic literature is about locating the literary mind in the groin, or rather “feeling with someone else’s body parts.”
The list was compiled by staff columnists James R. Peterson and Stacy Klein (by their own admission experts on the subject of “hot type”) and subsumes an interesting array of authors, including Henry Miller for Tropic of Cancer, Anne Rice for Interview with the Vampire Nabakov for Lolita, Erica Jong for Fear of Flying, Georges Bataille for Story of the Eye, Pauline Reage of Story of O fame, and Harold Robbins for The Carpet Baggers.
The rest of the list is composed of a variety of works, some of which might justifiably arouse interest for their “liberation” of the language in the courtroom, others that might euphemistically be called ‘tenderly frivolous.’
But the list wasn’t without an internal hierarchy of its own and perhaps expectedly Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley emerged as twin pretenders to the crown, with the former finally winning out over the latter. For all her notorious exploits, Lady Chatterley may well chafe at being bumped down a notch by an eighteenth century schoolmarm, even if Rococo is the new Modern.
Aside from emphasising the (intriguing) longevity of John Cleland and D.H. Lawrence, the list retains a certain interest by revealing a talent for sexiness hitherto unknown in English novelists.
Published in Bookseller+Publisher in June 2006
Alae Taule'alo 