My rating:
add to my books
Loading...
My Mother/Madame Edwarda/The Dead Man
My Mother is a unique bildungsroman of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother.?Publishers WeeklyMy Mother, Madame Edwarda and The Dead Man comprises three short pieces of erotic prose that fuse elements of sex and spirituality in a highly personal vision of the flesh. They present a world of sensation in which only the vaulting demands of disruptive e...more
Paperback, 224 pages
Published
September 1st 2000
by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd
(first published 1989)
There is a good chance some of your friends read this book. Sign in to see!
sign in »
Friend Reviews
To see what your friends thought of this book,
please sign up.
This book is currently not featured on any Listopia lists.
Add this book to your favorite list »
Community Reviews
(showing
1-30
of
355)
I am a big fan of Georges Bataille's fiction. He borders on the creepy of course, but its his intelligence that is seductive. I wish he was alive now. He's someone I would like to meet and have a cup of coffee with. Would he drink coffee? Yukio Mishima wrote the introduction to this book which is worth the price of the volume.
view all 3 comments
Despite what Mishima might have you believe in the preface, 'My Mother' is the key work here. Highly recommended for a good read to fans of Genet, H Miller, Nin, Breton, Proust, Cendrars (actually pretty much everyone born or relocated to France in the first half of the 20th century), and (obviously) quite interesting to folks with an interest in phil/psych/gender studies etc through the lens of Sade, Freud, Foucault, etc. I enjoyed this more deeply than Story of the Eye, it has greater characte...more
Bataille is an analyst of the erotic, and in these narratives he explores and exploits the transformative and sometimes destructive power of sex. While his association of violence with eroticism may remind some of the Marquis de Sade, one significant difference between the two writers is that Bataille does not focus as much as de Sade does on representing the details of the sexual act itself; rather, Bataille emphasizes the moral and cultural context in which the sexual act occurs. Moreover, i...more
Georges Bataille was a highly controversial French writer, and the first of these novelettes, "My Mother," reads fairly easily in the original French ("Ma Mere"). Like all of his work, this is slim book is deeply disturbing. A mother sets out to corrupt her young son. She wants to disabuse him of the notion that she is virtuous and that his now deceased father is the cause of the family's unhappiness. She demands that he love her not as a naive imagination but in all her d...more
The Dead Man and Madame Edwarda are life-changing pieces of writing.
Lo estoy leyendo para mi taller "Pensar en lo marginal" de Joaquín Hurtado.
Fabulously perverted. Devastating, crawling skin-inducing, and soul crushing. Everything I look for in a good read.
"Ma Mere" is the gem here. One of the great French novellas.
Thomas
marked it as to-read
Sean Stevens
marked it as to-read
Kristtyna Gonzalez
marked it as to-read
skoob_books
added it
Molly
marked it as to-read
Robert
added it
Julie
marked it as to-read
Sean Patrick Dickerson
added it
Ernest Junius
marked it as to-read
imnobody whoareyou
added it
Shannon Kline
marked it as to-read
Ethel Margaret
marked it as to-read
Fiona
marked it as to-read
There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one »
French essayist, philosophical theorist and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, trans...more
More about Georges Bataille...
Share This Book
No trivia or quizzes yet. Add some now »
