Bataille’s non-fiction is infinitely better than his fiction, though judging by how artless, insipid, and juvenile his fiction is, that might not mean awfully lot when in fact he has some solid cultural theories. It’s a shame none of those have found their way into Story of the Eye, an inherently silly and dumb tale written in a way that’d cast an unimaginative and hormonal 12 year old boy’s writing in a superior light. The accounts are too stupid to be taken serious enough as transgressive. There’s no real culmination pulling the reader towards the end, which entirely fails to sound cathartic due to its flat writing.

This Penguin edition includes essays by Sontag and Barthes. Whereas Sontag isn’t as brilliant as usual in her meandering and evasive essay on pornographic literature, Barthes is characteristically so wrong in everything he ever said.

Mourning the loss of my money on a book that gives nothing but utter boredom.