Carla

by Sheldon Lord, Lawrence Block

When a woman from the slums marries a rich man who can’t pleasure her, she is driven to hunt for love outside the home

Carla is a beautiful girl. She was plucked from the obscurity of a Polish slum to be the wife of a wealthy man—a man who seemingly gives her everything a wife could want. Except the one thing that she needs most: the pleasure she burns for while he snores beside her, the passion that only a lover can give.

But adultery seems impossible until, suddenly, it happens. When she seduces a filling-station attendant, ruining her clothes in the grease of a mechanic’s floor, she starts to spin out of control. He is the first but not the last, as Carla learns that infidelity is no work at all.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lawrence Block, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from his personal collection, and a new afterword written by the author.

Genres: Fiction

176 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

A pseudonym used by Donald E. Westlake, Lawrence Block, Peter Hochstein and Milo Perichitch.

Books positively identified as Westlake's or Block's will also have their name in the author field.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was Lawrence Block's first published novel. Marketed to men of that era (1958) as a sex book about a nymphomanic, but it could just as easily have been marketed under a different name and with different art and jacket copy to women as a romance. This is a censorship era book so the sex scenes are veiled and euphemistic but I'm sure it was quite scandalous at the time. There is one particularly gruesome scene, a flashback to when Carla was fourteen and her mother takes her to to get a back alley abortion, that shows off the kind of writer Block would become. Otherwise, the writing here is similar to what Orrie Hitt was writing at the same time. Page after page of shallow psychology passed off as the character's, mostly Carla's, thought processes.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

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