Daze Reader

Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2005 nominees

http://www.dazereader.com/24000915.htm Literary Review will bestow the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award tonight at a London gala. The Guardian has an article about and excerpts from the longlisted nominees, including works by John Updike, Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Marlon Brando.

Last year I wrote:

The avowed purpose of the Bad Sex award is to restore priggish embarrassment toward explicit prose, "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." But the annual media coverage of the award tends to treat it more as a tongue-in-cheek celebration of loopy, breathless, over-the top sex writing. And why not? One purpose of literature is to make the familiar seem strange, to relate common experiences in creative ways, and why should sex be any different? I like most of the nominated passages.

The Guardian article plays along, calling this year's nominees "excruciating" and full of "unintentional humor", but once again I like most of the nominated passages. OK, the Paul Theroux is pretty bad. But what kind of philistine could snigger and scoff at this lovely Garcia Marquez paragraph?

On the night of her birthday I sang the entire song to Delgadina, and I kissed her all over her body until I was breathless: her spine, vertebra by vertebra, down to her languid buttocks, the side with the mole, the side of her inexhaustible heart. As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. She responded with new vibrations along every inch of her skin, and on each one I found a distinctive heat, a unique taste, a different moan, and her entire body resonated inside with an arpeggio, and her nipples opened and flowered without being touched. I was beginning to fall asleep in the small hours when I heard something like the sound of multitudes in the sea and a panic in the trees that pierced my heart. I went to the bathroom and wrote on the mirror: Delgadina, my love, the Christmas breezes have arrived.

Priggishness aside, there's something pathetic about a panel of unpublished lightweights belittling the likes of Updike and Rushdie and Marquez. It's the literary equivalent of those VH1 shows where Hollywood hangers-on and ex-reality show contestants make catty remarks about Madonna and Bjork and George Clooney.

More tomorrow after the announcement.

 

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