Women's Rites: Essays in the Erotic Imagination

A sadomasochistic ""stroke-book'' dressed up in arty prose, this short, erotic tell-all lurches from New York S-M clubs to a public whipping on the banks of the Seine. The pseudonymous French author is identified as the wife of the pseudonymous Jean de Berg, whose erotic novel, The Image, was also published by Grove. Most of the text consists of detailed accounts of elaborate S-M rituals with pseudoreligious overtones, anonymous sex, humiliating punishments and the like. Most readers will probably find much of the material repellent. The author intermittently attempts to explain her predilections in a style as convoluted as it is vapid (``Excretion and defilement are desired as so much evidence of their search for a vertiginous purity that involves them in an endless spiral . . . ''). Her fondness for a black ``acolyte,'' whom she parades on a leash, has racist overtones. Literary Guild alternate. (November)