For personal reasons, we do not encourage the use of puns. Except for really good ones. We like those. See headline below. Plus, it’s Awards Season, and we do like to keep tabs on our favorite honors. Like the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award. It should go without saying that someday we hope to be honored with a little plaque or trophy for our contribution to the oeuvre. Oh sure, we’re going to have to work hard — this is not a prize awarded to rank amateurs.
But, excruciating as his entry is, Updike is up against some stiff competition. Among the 11 contenders for the prize this year are some of the biggest names in literature, including Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Paul Theroux. Of the three, Theroux’s offering, from Blinding Light, is arguably the most deserving of the prize, with its description of a character’s orgasm as
“…not juice at all but a demon eel thrashing in his loins and swimming swiftly up his cock, one whole creature of live slime fighting the stiffness as it rose and bulged at the tip and darted into her mouth.”
Theroux does, at least, manage to insert some punctuation into his description. Giles Coren, however, is in the running for an extract which comprises a 138-word long sentence followed by a two-word followup (“Like Zorro”, in case you were wondering) and which contains the alarming image of an excited male member “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath”.
Note to all women (and interested men): if it’s leaping around in that fashion, it’s possessed. And not in a good way.
2 responses so far ↓
Brenda Coulter // Dec 2, 2005 at 10:20 am
I read in this morning’s Guardian that the “shower hose” guy walked away with the prize.
You’ve got your work cut out for you, Booksquare, if you ever hope to win this award.
Booksquare // Dec 2, 2005 at 10:19 pm
It’s a little sad, how little faith you have in me. I can write really bad with the best of them. Though I will admit that I had my money on the lobster dude. Talk about your warped mind….