Classic Erotica: Emmanuelle by Emmanuelle Arsan
This classic book of erotica is, alongside Story of O, the most famous French underground novel of the late twentieth century and a work of seductive literary merit.
It begins with nineteen-year-old Emmanuelle’s flight from London to join her husband in Bangkok. On the airplane, she is seduced by the passenger seated next to her. By the time they land, she has indulged her irrepressible and insatiable sexual appetite, embarking on an odyssey of hedonistic sensual discovery that takes her from the arms of her husband to intimate encounters with the wives of his business associates, to further explorations wherein the philosophical and aesthetic facets of eroticism are expounded—and enacted—to the fullest degree.
Intoxicating and intelligent, Emmanuelle, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its initial clandestine publication in France, follows one woman’s liberation from unconscious to intensely conscious sexuality. It is as pertinent today as it was four decades ago.
“Lyrical and graphic . . . But it’s not all salacious play-by-play. The sex scenes are interspersed with abstract musings about the nature of sex. One of the central ideas, which I will now clinically paraphrase to conform to standards of decency, is this: The definition of the erotic is arousal, not climax . . . the book’s argument reverberates beyond the erotic. The writing I most enjoy now delights in the moment’s contours and textures, not surprising plot twists. The best work seduces the reader through nuanced details and observations, and does away with italics and exclamation points. It takes pleasure in the ambiguous interstices of life while dismissing its flagrant resolutions. In short, it arouses.”
Marayat Rollet-Andriane formerly Marayat Krasaesin or her birthname Marayat Bibidh (;rtgs: Marayat Phiphit; born 19 January 1932 – 12 June 2005), known by the pen name Emmanuelle Arsan, was a French novelist of Eurasianorigin, best known for the novel featuring the fictional character Emmanuelle, a woman who sets out on a voyage of sexual self-discovery under varying circumstances. However, it was later claimed that the real author of the book was her husband, Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane.
