F/32

By Eurydice (Eurudice) and Eurydice Kamvisseli

Book Overview

Beauty invited the Beast for a stroll on a crystal path strewn with hollow silver hearts that were being stirred up by stiff gusts of wind like clouds of dust: and so everything began.

And so begins F/32, Eurudice's award-winning first novel about Ela (a pseudonym meaning orgasm). The sight of Ela stops all hearts. Ela is an expert in love. No matter how many people love her, she daily inspires more. She spends half her life avoiding the people who love her, and the other half making them love her. She is mind blowing.

A mock-quest for self-understanding and unification, F/32 lures the reader into a landscape of sexual alienation, continually interrupted by gags, dreams, mirror reflections, flashbacks, and scenes from Manhattan street life. It is a wild, eccentric, Rabelaisian romp through most forms of amorous excess. But it is also a troubling tale orbiting around a public sexual assault on the streets of Manhattan. Between the poles of desire and butchery the novel and Ela sail, the awed reader going along for one of the most dazzling rides in recent American fiction.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0932511376
• ISBN13: 9780932511379
• Release Date: April 1991
• Publisher: Fiction Collective Two, Incorporated
• Length: 276 Pages
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Bizarre, disturbing, funny, and unique

My edition of this book has praise from both Kathy Acker and Robert Coover on the back, and that's a pretty good indication of the contents: a strange, dreamlike story about a woman and her genitals, which doesn't shy away from knees-together wince-inducingly gory passages or prosodic flights of iconoclastic brilliance. This book isn't for the squeamish, but if you like Acker, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, or the short stories of David Foster Wallace, you'll probably enjoy it. It's definitely a horizon-broadener.

Vagina At Large

This novel is a must-read. A hidden gem. I've rarely seen sex and lust described so accurately and brilliantly. It's the story of a woman and her vagina and their many surreal adventures (the title comes from the f/32 camera lens, because the vagina becomes a camera lens briefly and it shoots some very strange stuff...; it even goes on the Tonight show and Letterman; it goes to a men's and a women's prisons; it ends up in an art exhibit in a gallery). The novel shows the end-of-century narcissism (the protagonist's main lover is the mirror) which by the end is changed into a natural self-sustained relationship between the vagina and its owner. It's like a modern fable. It has a crazy happy ending (after the early butchery). The author has also written "Satyricon USA". Classic stuff.