The Other Side of Desire
Four Journeys into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Jacob is a man with an overwhelming attraction to female feet. The Baroness is a clothing designer and evangelical sadist. Roy is a wedding band singer entranced by his step daughter. Ron and Laura are simply in love - only Laura lost both her legs in a car accident, and Ron is beguiled by a beauty many would be blind to.
How do we deal with desire? Our own, and the desires of others? How do we comprehend desires that are extreme, or unacceptable? And how do those who have them, live with them?
In A Map of Desire Daniel Bergner takes us on a journey into human passion suffered, endured, and celebrated. Desire is a sometimes anarchic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes destructive, sometimes redeeming, and always powerful force.Immersing himself in it through the people whose lives he follows and the scientists he spends time with who are trying to understand it, slowly he exposes and illuminates layers of our humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As if it weren't already difficult enough to find a suitable mate, what if a prerequisite was that the lover be missing an arm or a leg? Or willing to be roasted on a spit? Comparatively, a mild-mannered foot fetish seems, well, pedestrian. Bergner (God of the Rodeo) investigates how "we become who we are sexually, whether our lusts are common or improbable." The book's combination of titillation, shock value and documentary evokes a set of page-turning conundrums: is a man who desires feet any less odd than the psychiatrist who treats him or the scientist who studies pedophilia or the journalist who describes a whipping session in precise detail or the reader who becomes voyeur? It's all fairly delicate and disturbing material, and while the descriptions can grow florid, the author's strongest moments (e.g., evoking the tabooed desires impelling the artist Hans Bellmer's work) compensate for the lapse. Bergner has an empathetic sensibility and convincingly suggests that what a fetishist needs is a willing and loving partner with complementary interests.
