EROS

Not since Stendhal's On Love has a book celebrated the love of women with the unfettered honesty of Alberto Bevilacqua's Eros. Half Memoir and half novel, without apology or embarrassment, Eros explores the forms and meaning of physical passion in a man's life.

A bestseller in Italy, this lyric exploration of sexuality?part memoir, part unabashed erotica, part rarefied meditation?will probably resonate less intensely with a U.S. readership. In a mosaic of sexual encounters, vignettes, memory fragments, parables and conversations, Italian novelist/poet/filmmaker Bevilacqua reminisces on his boyhood sexual awakening and former lovers, with passing commentary on jealousy, the joys of auto-eroticism and oral sex, erotic slang and women's secret fantasies. He muses on society's growing romantic and personal desperation, heightened by the breakdown of community. For Bevilacqua, eros, when it fuses sex and love, is a way of remembering our best selves by sharing a primordial identity with the beloved. Poetic ecstasies alternate with unsettling images of eros perverted: child prostitution in Africa, voyeurism, newspaper sex scandals and murder scandals. McGarrell's musical translation of this impassioned hymn to eros felicitously conveys Bevilacqua's sensuous, literary style. The author's lavish admiration of women's body parts, his frequent characterization of women as seducers, betrayers or teases, and his interpretation of female bisexuality as a form of narcissism may explain why some Italian feminists attacked Eros, while others praised it.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An odd mixture of touchy-feely meditation and clinical speculation on eros and its many expressions. A bestseller in Italy, Eros presents Bevilacqua as the archetypal ``Sensitive Guy,'' appalled by the brutish nature of many men, ever solicitous of his own (many) lovers. ``Eros is not, can never be, as so many men believe, purely penetration. This is profanation. . . . Some men cast off the power contained in their semen in a few minutes. They are blind and deaf to Eros.'' Weaving together autobiographical recollections and reflections inspired by tales that he has been told about lovers past and present, Bevilacqua covers such diverse matters as the most explosive orgasm he ever provoked, the challenges and pleasures of oral sex, his first sexual experience, and the strange connection between sex and death. He recalls amorous games. He muses on voyeurism and masturbation. He offers definitions of various perversions (scopophilia, bestiality) and a variety of pronouncements about the different ways in which men and women experience sexual need. Interspersed with these ingredients are miniature case studies of people altered or devastated by erotic encounters. Although the book is often disarmingly frank and does offer some surprisingly sensitive psychological insight (Bevilacqua observes, for instance, that some women may go through a bisexual phase when male aggression seems particularly threatening), it rambles rather too much. A refreshingly frank discussion of the sexual experience that nevertheless seems finally more talky than stirring. There's light here, but, surprisingly, not much heat. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"Don't take offense," the well-known Italian novelist Bevilacqua writes as he plunges into a lifetime's memory of erotic encounters. "What does storytelling mean, especially telling certain stories?" His "certain stories" are moments of perfect pleasure achieved by opening himself to the possibilities of human connection?in a glance, the contemplation of a woman's body, or in feelings of pity or remorse. For Bevilacqua, sex is the "primal, irresistible" act that favors the silences and confessions that, in turn, engender poetry. He culls from regional legends, hearsay, gossip, and his most intimate evocations of first love and longing in his native Parma. For example, he tells the story of ugly Pietro and his fetish for keeping tufts of pubic hair like trophies from his conquests. There is much play in Bevilacqua's work, and pokes at the sanctimonious mores of his country; when speaking of fantasies or fetishes, he can even assume the knowing tone of a psychiatrist. Published in Italy to best-seller acclaim and smoothly translated here, these lyrical musings of an aging man on what once was or could have been are heartbreakingly beautiful. For literature collections.?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.