A provocative and entrancing autobiography that’s both titillating and authentic.
A debut memoir chronicles the sexual coming-of-age of an early-21st-century playboy.
In his book, the author uses the pseudonym A Young Don Juan in order “to make my story universal” and to intensively explore the impact that sex had on his youth. After a cerebral introduction, the fun begins as Don Juan smoothly moves into the details of his childhood “pre-erection days” with first crushes and female acts of coddling that translated into a “Freudian sense of sex” for him. An adolescent of divorced parents, the author satisfied his voyeuristic urges by spying on his aunt undressing and perusing Playboy magazines. But when it came time to make contact with the opposite sex, pessimism about his looks dampened any enthusiasm. Eventually, Don Juan’s outlook changed by age 15 when a girl named Christine captivated him and then broke his heart. After losing his virginity in a massage parlor, he felt his testosterone surge, and his college years found him searching “for connection through sex like a dog looking for companionship in the trees he marks.” Traveling abroad opened his eyes to enthralling cultures where desire was openly expressed. During these trips, the author formed his own impressions about the people, places, and cultural differences he encountered as well as reflecting on the nature of human desire, the complexities of liaisons with married women, and the raw power of an “over-ripe libido.” At 18, Don Juan was told by a sexually satisfied nanny that he “had the makings of becoming a great lover,” a confidence booster that led to further erotic dalliances, from Manhattan to Paris to Thailand. Love temporarily broke up the libidinous episodes, but he soon rebounded with riskier sexual escapades in places like bathroom stalls and apartment stoops. The author’s writing is regal, intelligent, social media contemporary, and provocative without becoming raunchy. Still, the prose can sometimes be too precious and gilded for the raw extremes of the subject matter, which eventually runs out of steam. But not before Don Juan recounts that he finally realized it was “time to grow up” and his intriguing ruminations turn inward toward the spiritual and mystical. Readers who enjoy erotic accounts written from a unique, cleverly intuitive perspective and spiced with a pungent, feverish hedonism will be pleased to discover the heady material blossoming in the pages of this candid memoir.
A provocative and entrancing autobiography that’s both titillating and authentic.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-8548-2
Page Count: 214
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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