cover image Indecent Recollection

Indecent Recollection

Agustina Izquierdo. Marlboro Press, $17.95 (113pp) ISBN 978-1-56897-014-1

Set in Barcelona under a dictatorial regime in 1927, this erotic, intellectual debut novel may strike some readers as a mordant satire of radical feminism. Others will view it as a feminist manifesto; still others may find it simply asinine. Elena Berrocal, beautiful onetime terrorist and bombmaker, devotee of Martin Heidegger, refuses to have sex with her live-in boyfriend, Didac Cabanillas, a sensitive artistic type who is madly in love with her. Having been traumatized by the soap suppositories given to her by her father when she was a girl, the independent-minded Elena has resolved never to marry or to procreate. The only pleasure she permits is insertion of her lover's finger in her anal cavity, and only while there are other people nearby. Reluctantly, the desperate Didac fulfills her strange whim-at the opera, at a church wedding, etc.-with the proviso that after seven digital trysts, they will have conventional intercourse. When the longed-for moment arrives, he is impotent. Each of the lovers confides the details of this affair to the bemused narrator, Blas Renfo, which makes for a wry contrast between Elena's forthright account and Didac's more romanticized, reticent version. Interpersed in this kinky tale are the protagonists's lyric pronouncements on love, death, fate, desire, patriarchy and God. But this high-flown philosophizing and the untitillating erotica never cohere into a compelling narrative. (Feb.)