· Judges underwhelmed by Mailer's 'grinding hound'
Sarah Crown, Wednesday November 28, 2007, The Guardian
Author Norman Mailer, who has posthumously won this year's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA
When it comes to truly deplorable writing, not even death, it seems, lets you off the hook. This year's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award has gone to the late Norman Mailer for a description of oral sex in his final novel, The Castle in the Forest, in which a male member is likened to a "coil of excrement".
"It was the excrement that tipped the balance," admitted Philip Womack, assistant editor of the Literary Review, whose editorial staff judge the annual prize. "That, and the line about Alois [the male character] being 'ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety'. That was pretty awful."
This is the first time in its 15-year history that the award - established in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, then editor of the Literary Review, to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it" - has been bestowed posthumously... (Article continues)
ΚΙ ΑΥΤΟ: Υστερόγραφο για τον Νόρμαν Μέϊλερ. ΑΠΟ ΤΟΝ ΣΤΕΦΑΝΟ ΔΑΝΔΟΛΟ. Paper 30/11/2007
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