The Word "Desire"

by Rikki Ducornet

These twelve startlingly original stories about erotic desire are the best opportunity yet for adventurous readers to discover and explore the fiction of Rikki Ducornet, who over the past three decades has created a body of work that is as daring and finely wrought as any writer's. Each of these stories centers on a pivotal erotic moment in the lives of the men and women who narrate them. Desire is awakened by such seemingly inconsequential events as a glance, a dream, a thought, or a chance encounter. Yet in each instance a life is forever changed. Only a few are overtly sexual in content, but each explores the many strange reverberations that occur when desire is present, whether acted upon or kept inside.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Female Authors, Literature, American

193 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Rikki Ducornet (born Erika DeGre, April 19, 1943 in Canton, New York) is an American postmodernist, writer, poet, and artist.

Ducornet's father was a professor of sociology, and her mother hosted community-interest programs on radio and television. Ducornet grew up on the campus of Bard College in New York, earning a B.A. in Fine Arts from the same institution in 1964. While at Bard she met Robert Coover and Robert Kelly, two authors who shared Ducornet's fascination with metamorphosis and provided early models of how fiction might express this interest. In 1972 she moved to the Loire Valley in France with her then husband, Guy Ducornet. In 1988 she won a Bunting Institute fellowship at Radcliffe. In 1989 she moved back to North America after accepting a teaching position in the English Department at The University of Denver. In 2007, she replaced retired Dr. Ernest Gaines as Writer in Residence at the The University of Louisiana. In 2008, The American Academy of Arts and Letters conferred upon her one of the eight annual Academy Awards presented to writers.

Reviews

[Mathilda]

liked the writing but not the stories
my imagination is too impoverished for these strange far-fetched tales

[Karl Nehring · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some interesting writing in terms of use of language, but overall, a most undedifying book. I felt after the first couple of stories that I should not bother to keep reading, but I hung on to the end. Now I wish I had not.

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

she writes preciously

[Raquel Ballesteros Barajas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Absolutely loved some of the stories (Fortune, The Student from Algiers and Vertige Dore), definitely didn't like the last one, and didn't particularly cared about the rest to either love or hate.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started as a 3 and then I just lost interest.

Quotes

"Within such a chamber we might forget that moments are extinguished as they happen...." (44)

"'I thought that beauty is not a thing unto itself...but the vehicle by which the spiritual is revealed.'" (79)

[Tom Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author Ducornet is an excellent writer. Her descriptive powers are excellent. Some of the stories left gruesome images on my brain. The stories are worldly and exotic.

[Exquisite Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess lord

[Vel Veeter]

I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed this book, though I thought some of the stories to be very good. I think there’s something almost purposely alienating or impersonal about a lot of the stories here, and it feels like a very intelligent collection, and not that different from the Helen Dewitt book Some Trick I recently reviewed.

These are smart, erudite stories, and feel spiritually connected to someone like Borges and others like him, where there’s a lot of brain power going through them, but a questionable amount of humanity.

That’s ok by me, but that doesn’t lead me to always enjoy them so much.

I am reminded a lot of the opening section of Roberto Bolano’s 2666, The Part about the Scholars, where four literary scholars sort of traipse around the world looking for clues about a reclusive author that brought them all together. While there’s a lot of intelligent and interesting conversation that happens and an erudite explanation of especially European arts, there’s a kind of emotional detachment that blocks a full human connection to the work. So like I said, it’s interesting for me, less engaging.

Here’s a selection:

“My passion for Egypt was sparked at the opera. Until the night of The Magic Flute my dreams were so savorless they seemed to belong to another. But the palms, the Sphinx smiling like the Mona Lisa beneath the moon, had me bouncing up and down yapping: “Wow! Wow!” My mistress was already famous and so I was not scolded, nor were we sent away. Instead we had inspired a brief but flattering fashion among the Incroyables: now every woman of taste was carrying a little black dog to the opera. I was distressed by this proliferation of look-alikes, for having been the only black pup in the litter, I had until then thought of myself as exceptional. The night of The Magic Flute I dreamed astonishing dreams; they fulfilled all my expectations as to what dreaming could be. After that vivid night I knew that though I looked like any number of little dogs, I, Heaven help me, did not imagine as they imagined. And this to my pride and consternation, for I was exceedingly lonely and in the company of my peers bored to tears when—as happened every afternoon—I was forced to share the better part of the day with ladies of quality and their witless pets—each one a basket case, and this is not only because they were carried from place to place in baskets but because of the milk soup passing for conversation among them. And there were terrible times when during a brief encounter in the streets of Paris I risked being eaten alive by dogs so vicious and gigantic it was my conviction they belonged to another species. How often I wished for a spiked collar or, better still, an ivory tower! “

[Ele Munjeli · Rating 3 out of 5]

It isn't erotica, quite; few of the stories were explicit. Yet, all of them dealt with sexual expression, repression or suppression. The exotic locales and historical details of some stories refer to the genre, as well. Descriptive and elegant prose made it a compelling read. Longing is a theme, and several of the tales will leave you hanging. Illumination and sexual intuition are closely linked by the author, but she isn't an advocate for promiscuity, or decadence. The struggle of intimacy, how it comes easily between some, but not necessarily with lovers, is an important idea. Ducornet makes good use of witness in her narration: a story narrated by someone standing aside, who perhaps understands the conflict better than the lovers themselves, because of sympathy and objectivity.

[Russ · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly uneven collection of stories that all turn on some type of desire. Some of the stories, like the title story that ends the book, give interesting and well-written dramatizations of how desire affects a characters. Other stories don't fare so well. I can see how a writer would think, "wouldn't it be a good idea if I wrote a story on desire from the perspective of a pet dog?" What I can't understand is how the writer wouldn't follow that thought with this one: "No, no it wouldn't." Still, I'd look at her novels based on the quality of the writing, but I'm not hurrying out to buy all her books.

[Christopherseelie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rikki Ducornet is one of my favorite living authors. Her stories relish the exotic, the romantic, sensuality, sexual vibrancy, and enigma. This collection is smaller and less experimental than The Butcher's Tales. The result is that while you rarily feel let down, there are only a few stories that really go for the inexplicable beauty I associate with her work. When she gets it, she gets it with equal grace as her earlier work, but with the added precision due to experience.
Frankly, these stories are generous to the reader and I'm at a loss for reasons to explain why it's not a Best seller.

[Apio · Rating 4 out of 5]

When she doesn't wander too far into postmodern experimentation, Rikki Ducornet is one of my favorite fiction writers. Her fiction is poetic flavor and a dreamy, with intense black humor to spice it all up. This book contains a dozen tales dealing with a broad spectrum of the erotic. Rikki Ducornet is not afraid to touch on the forbidden, but in ways that are always as tasteful as they are tasty. I highly recommend this book.

[Kay Baird · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story "The Neurosis of Containment" from this collection turned me on. The rest were all over the map, but nevertheless both sensuous and stimulating. Often arousing, due to the feeling that they transgressed beyond acceptable ideas and topics.

[Jeannie Miller]

These short stories, each set in a different time and place, are connected by the common theme of desire. They are exquisitely rendered and suitable for reading aloud. I hadn't heard of Ducornet before, but I will be seeking out her other work.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite ducornet, my favorite subject

[Terresa Wellborn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars fifty pages in, how is this possible/where have I been?

Beautiful.

[Doc]

Richly layered, exotic stories with invention and poetry comparable to the work of Angela Carter.