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the complete review - fiction

The Sextine Chapel

by
Hervé Le Tellier

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : limited but playful coupling-variations

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The Sextine Chapel is a more nakedly laid-out series of sex scenarios, each in a half-page of prose. Proceeding through a kind of spirographic, tag-team dance card, one member of the first amorous pair goes on to engage with someone new on the next page, who, in turn, carries the torch on to the next tryst and so on. (...) Le Tellier teases out the erotic space between intellectual bodies getting it on in a kind of mathematical chapel of love" - Lee Ann Brown, Bomb
  
  
• "Bei dieser Regeldichte mögen Bedenken aufkommen: Kann es da noch lustvoll zugehen? Ja, das kann es, durchaus. Das Korsett engt nicht nur ein, es befreit auch, und es ermöglicht Überraschungen. Und wie oft bei oulipotischen Werken liegt ein Teil des Lesevergnügens nicht zuletzt auch darin, hinter das Regelwerk zu kommen und dessen Auswirkungen zu verfolgen. (...) Die kurzen und kurzweiligen Texte erzählen mit knappem Gestus von sexuellem Appetit und Vergnügen, gelegentlich auch von deren Abwesenheit, und die Lustmomente werden am Ende jeweils milde abgebremst von zwei, drei kursiv gesetzten Sätzen, die wie ein Eisbeutel jede Exaltation abkühlen und das eben Erzählte mitunter ironisieren" - Martin Zingg, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "In this clever literary bonbon, 26 characters get it on in 78 vignettes, ranging from the banal to the raunchy. (...) At its best, Le Tellier's English-language debut seduces the reader with its wry wit" - Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
  

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The complete review's Review:

       The Sextine Chapel is a work of both systematic and (seemingly) random sexual couplings. Oulipo-author Le Tellier works with several constraints here, as he presents an alphabetical ronde of what are more or less sex-acts (ranging from fondling to intercourse, though the chapters include sexless post-coital scenes (one partner asleep) and the like as well). It's one couple per chapter, beginning with Anna and Ben getting it on and then advancing (Ben and Chloe, Chloe and Dennis, etc.) all the way to Zach and Anna. But it doesn't end there: there is a criss-crossing of partners, as each of the twenty-six participants hooks up with five others, all in a neat Oulipian symmetry: a diagram at the end of the book of the ceiling of the 'Sextine chapel' shows the geometrical pattern at work here.
       Each chapter consists only of a single short descriptive paragraph, of A and B (or X and Y) engaged (more or less) in some sort of mutual sexual activity, as well as a shorter note appended to it, describing what goes through one or the other's mind, or some other observation (including such as: "Ursula does not realize that, confronted by his swollen member, she now has the reptilian gaze of a crocodile in a tanner's workshop"). There is some overlap, and there are various echoes, such as a repeated Bataille-quote; as the sex acts wend there way around and back and forth there is also some causal advancement (what X does with Y coloring what Y does with Z, etc.), though hardly enough that one could speak of any sort of plot. Sex is the thing here, the individual acts the focus -- though there's no effort to be particularly encyclopedic (the variations are, given the possibilities, rather limited), and the acts themselves include their share of disappointments ("Galata's heroic efforts are having no effect on Zach's member, which remains more like a noodle than a triumphant totem pole").
       Each chapter is so short that these remained limited descriptions -- little more than brief sex scenes -- but Le Tellier sketches them out fairly amusingly and well. Though there's limited variation among the acts themselves, his carefully phrased descriptions make for enough variety to prevent the collection from getting tiresome. And there are some genuinely funny scenes, as well as clever after-thoughts in the secondary bit to each chapter (from Niels, "Stunned by this festival of literary clichés", to what Mao's wife Jiang Qing supposedly sometimes added to one of Mao's comments).
       And there's the occasional bit of wisdom, too:

For the clumsy, the clitoris is the Rubik's Cube of sex: they can fiddle around with it for hours without getting anywhere.

- M.A.Orthofer, 3 April 2011

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Links:

• Dalkey Archive Press publicity page
• Le Castor Astral publicity page
• Diaphenes publicity page

• Bomb
• Encres Vagabondes (French)
• letters and sodas
• Literatur & so (German)
• Livre du jour (French)
• Neue Zürcher Zeitung (German)
• Nouvelle Revue Moderne (French)
• Les petits mots de cat (French)
• Publishers Weekly
• Terres de femmes (French)

• Oulipo site

• All Happy Families
• The Anomaly
• Eléctrico W
• Enough about Love
• The Intervention of a Good Man
• A Thousand Pearls (for a Thousand Pennies)

• Harry Mathews' more Singular Pleasures
• Okuda Hideo offers a similar but smaller go-round, in Lala Pipo
• See Index of Oulipo books
• Lauren Elkin writes on Le Tellier in The End of Oulipo ?
• See Index of Erotic, Pornographic, and Sex-related books
• See Index of French literature
• Other books from Dalkey Archive Press under review

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About the Author:

       French author Hervé Le Tellier was born in 1957. He is a member of the Oulipo.

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© 2011-2022 the complete review

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