One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

by Lawrence Venuti (Translator), Melissa Parente (Author), Lawrence Venuti (Translator)

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.35

  This summer?s highlight from Serpent?s Tail: the book that scandalised a nation. One Hundred Strokes has sold over 700 000 copies in Italy. One very hot Italian summer, a schoolgirl sits alone in her bedroom, staring at posters of Marlene Dietrich and listening to classical music. She strips before her mirror, examining her adolescent body pleasurably, yet without desire. She writes: ?I want love, diary. I want to feel my heart melt, to see the stalactites of my ice shatter and sink in the river of passion, of beauty.? The narrator searches for love but the men she meets only want sex. With the pain of unrequited love comes the excitement caused by her discovery of the sexual power she has over men (and other women). This diary of a teenage girl?s sex life is a work of deceptive innocence. Influenced by Nabokov and Anais Nin, it is both erotic and literary. When the book was first published, it was assumed that this could not be the work of a teenager. In fact it is the first novel of a young writer of great literary talent. ?Remarkably self-assured... the shock waves of this schoolgirl?s confession are still reverberating? The Times ?This book is remarkable. With any luck it will utterly scandalize the people who still think of teenage girls as half-formed dolls in pretty boxes. A warm and sexy read.? BelleDeJour.com ?A wisp of a book with a wallop of an impact? New York Times ?Catherine Millet can go put her clothes on. Seventeen years old, Melissa P. has become a literary phenomenon in Italy... a real literary talent in the Sicilian fabular tradition of Giovanni Verga? Les Echos