A friend recently sent me a copy of Alina Reyes' erotic novella The Butcher. It is indeed beautifully written, on the whole, but there are moments when it seems to stray too far outside the erotic and into a territory all its own. Take this moment, for instance, just one of many in a sea of bizarre and apparently unconnected utterances:
Have you ever been struck by the mysterious presence of huge pumpkins in the middle of a kitchen garden? There they are, calm and luminous as Buddhas, as heavy as you are, and suddenly, before this strange creation of the earth, you are seized by doubt, you topple over outside of reality, you look at your own body in astonishment and you fumble around like a blind person. The garden remains impassive, it continues to hang its shiny tomatoes and peas in their pods, to cloak itself with sweet-smelling parsley and open-headed lettuce. And quietly, you go away, a stranger.
Well, yes. Her description of pumpkins is wonderfully precise. The rest of the passage, however, merits a place of honour in Pseud's Corner. And it seems curiously out of place in an erotic story. Personally, I can't recall ever fumbling about like a blind person after looking at a pumpkin. But that's the French for you.
Don't let me put you off reading it though; there's still much to be admired in The Butcher, and you can never go wrong with an erotic story where the words meat and flesh occur so often.
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