Venus as a Boy

By Luke Sutherland

Book Overview

In a small flat in London, a young man is turning to gold. But before he dies, before his skin and eyes and tongue harden into a golden death mask, he wants to share the amazing story of his life.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0747569053
• ISBN13: 9780747569053
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 164 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Appearances are hell, empathy is heaven

A strange and fascinating book indeed, right from the Orkney Islands, or something like that, from the far distant North of the United Kingdom, or Scotland if you want to be more precise. And that definitely is the first subject of the book. We get down into the violence of life on these islands, violence against the weak of course, all kinds of weak people, It is fun to be violent with the weak, especially if there is a reason like they are black, they are gay, they are girls, or just they are boys who would not fight back. What about the story of such a boy? Submissive, he will find pleasure not in the violence per se but in the submissive humiliation he will cultivate as a power over the bully, a power that will make him look for ways to give that bully pleasure even if it is at the cost of his own suffering in his hands or under his blows. And little by little, discovering sexual pleasure and all, sex will be a tool to give pleasure even to those who would refuse it straight away if they had not been charmed into accepting it, or even raped into accepting it. The main character thus develops a life of subservient sex in which he finds the pleasure he wants in the pleasure he gives. His initial submissive attitude he experienced with the bully on his island will lead him to get hooked to a pimp in London who sells the services of several originally male people who have kept their maleness, more or less, and satisfy the needs of men who are quite willing to accept gay sex provided it is from men who seem to be women by the way they dress, the hormonal body they have developed or the transsexual trip they have taken. It becomes poignant at the end because the man has been nurtured with hormones by his pimp for him to develop a female body, with a male organ. As an act of repayment, he decides not to use condoms any more and he gets hepatitis and he dies of it in a lot of suffering, turning gold little by little, loved in an extreme way by some gay bashing boy he raped one night with the help of two of his colleagues. The boy got attached to the experiment that turns into an experience and an absolute love that accompanies the man to his own accepted death. This novel about self-realization in extreme alienation is the denunciation of alienation, if we want to look at things from a political point of view, but it is also the poetical evocation of the enormous human power every single man has in himself, and women just as well, to create a full world of freedom and creativity, human compassion and empathy within that alienated frame. This is the extreme resilience the human species has and it explains why the worst possible wars or horrors do not deprive the survivors or the surviving victims to have a full life afterwards, partially based on forgetting and essentially based on creativity and the sublimation of the alienated episodes into positive thinking and action. You will enjoy this small novel if you are not perverted enough to be a fundamen

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This book is Golden, I read all night and didn't even notice. The writing makes it seem like a dream. But it's so fantastical it may all be true... I kind of wonder if.. think that it is, but I don't want to go searching & risk breaking the illusion.. You will fall in love with him. You'll wish you could go to Orkney & let him make you see the orchards & angels too.

Weird and wonderful

Why haven't more people read and reviewed this book??? This is the story of a boy with a gift - the gift to touch people with love, giving them visions of heaven. He is generous with his gift, offering his body up to be used and abused, perhaps because he knows how good receiving that love feels, having seen the visions once himself. However, while he's able to give love to others, the love he desires remains elusive to him, and though he goes through life hopeful of getting that feeling back, we know it's too late as he is telling his story from his death bed where he is slowly turning into gold. This book could well be a modern-day fairy tale, apart from that fairy tales are not usually associated with harsh reality and squalid backdrops. Despite its sordid "surroundings", this is a beautiful book.

this beauty within..................

To love and the ability to give love in stranger than strange contexts, is a beautiful experience. Moved me till all is 'gold'