Britain’s Literary Review has picked its candidates for the worst erotic writing of the year and centred out such literary luminaries as Alastair Campbell, John Updike and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Britain’s Literary Review picks its candidates for the worst erotic writing of the year
LONDON: Britain’s Literary Review has picked its candidates for the worst erotic writing of the year and centred out such literary luminaries as Alastair Campbell, John Updike and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Will it be Brazilian Paulo Coelho’s describing “the moment when Eve was reabsorbed into Adam’s body and the two halves became Creation”? Or Montefiore’s more demure expression of Communist love: “After 20 years of being the most rational Bolshevik woman in Moscow, this goblin has driven me crazy!”
The Bad Sex in Literature contest was created by former Review editor Auberon Waugh as a way of “gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”
Campbell, a former journalist and director of communications for Tony Blair, has been nominated for his novel All in the Mind, which features a passage of singularly inept sex. “He wasn’t sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled around it once more, and she pulled him toward her, it felt right,” he writes. “Then as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making purring noises, with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure he was losing his virginity.”
Brida continues its hyperbole with a transition from the act of creation to the very stars. “She could no longer control the world around her, her five senses seemed to break free and she wasn’t strong enough to hold on to them,” Coelho writes. “As if struck by a sacred bolt of lightning, she unleashed them, and the world, the seagulls, the taste of salt, the hard earth, the smell of the sea all disappeared, and in their place appeared a vast gold light, which grew and grew until it touched the most distant star in the galaxy.”
Allestree was nominated for her first novel, which features wolves mating and this scene involving humans: “He raised himself to his knees and bent to roll his tongue around her weeping orifice. He was bringing her to a pitch of ecstasy when she heard Madame Veuve, on the landing, put down the supper tray. Whiffs of onion soup strayed over them as he engulfed her. ‘Don’t stop,’ she clamoured; she was nearly there, it was in the bag.”
The prize, a plaster foot, will be awarded on November 25 in London. Last year’s prize was given posthumously to Norman Mailer for The Castle in the Forest.
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