The Other Hand Clapping
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“The most erotic organ is the mind.”
That was the principle that guided Marco Vassi, the foremost writer of erotica of his generation. In a series of novels unrivaled for searing arousal, Vassi created imagery that penetrated the imagination of men and women alike and turned on readers who believed no one could surpass Henry Miller. Unashamed, unabashed, and unrelenting, Vassi pushed erotica to new heights.
THE OTHER HAND CLAPPING
The Vassi Collection, Volume 12
"Larry felt something he hadn't experienced for years--the sharp clutch of jealousy twisting his stomach. In all the years they'd been together, he'd never doubted Eleanor's fidelity in the slightest." In this striking, startling novel, Vassie turns his talent to a tale that blends Zen and jealous passion into a suspenseful, erotically charged thriller. For Larry, he wonders if the evidence of his wife's supposed infidelity is real, or a hallucination produced by his own meditations...and inner fears. It all builds to a shattering climax that re-examines the idea of life, death, and sex.
Marco Vassi was, without a doubt, the foremost erotic writer of our generation. Praised by Norman Malier, Kate Millett, Saul Bellow, and Gore Vidal, he was not only the penultimate sexual explorer, but a literary craftsman whose own life experiences became the stuff of his fiction—expanded, of course, by a grand imagination and a full sense of the absurd. Tragically, Vassi died from pneumonia after he had contracted AIDS.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For no discernible reason, except possibly the banal search for "real identity,'' bookstore owner Larry, the 37-year-old protagonist here, enters the life of Zen meditation with a vengeance. Obsessed by the Zen mystique, he virtually abandons all else, including his ravishing wife Eleanor, an aspiring actress. He becomes ``quietistic in bed,'' moving from ``shared eroticism into solitary meditation,'' and from that inert state into absolute celibacy, a condition Eleanor doesn't much care for. Suddenly evidence of her infidelity mounts and along with it Larry's jealousy. But wait: Is it fact or Zen hallucination? Does Eleanor actually leave Larry and move in with a rich mobster who can advance her theatrical career, or is it all a ruse, an exercise in theater? What was meant as enigma and mystery soon dissolves into trickery, a sequence of puzzles within puzzles. Some signs suggest that Larry will kick Zen and return to sanity and the Scrabble games of the couple's good old days. Vassi has a considerable underground reputation as an ``erotic'' writer established over a dozen such novels. In this one, an attempted departure from that mode, his control of a tautly told tale slips badly and ends in sheer silliness.