Male Desire: A Cancer Pain?
I was somewhat startled (and then amused) to read this in the review of Elegy in The Guardian:
What the film can't reproduce is the continuous, acrid pain of what male desire often is, thwarted or not: a continuous, day-by-day, hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute pain, almost like a cancer pain.
Lol! I must be undersexed but in my experience it feels mostly like an annoyance, a vague source of distraction and irritation. Like Bunuel I will heave a sigh of relief when I am old and finally free. Somehow it hasn't worked with Roth. He has got only hornier and hornier with age.
1 comment:
This is indeed a fascinating sentence. 'Cancer pain' is certainly a strong way of putting it, even when watered down by the 'almost like' (added as an afterthought perhaps), or the decision to stop at 'minute by minute' (after all that, why not go the whole hog and say 'second by second'?) It's one of those examples when the sentiment seems so bound to this reviewer's personal experience that one wonders whether the passage was not in fact written by a little more frigid character, over-desperate to prove to an unknown reader that warm blood does run in his veins...
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