Before I read this work, I'd already read Bataille's "Erotism Death and Sensuality" (1957) ("EDAS") which amazed and confounded me. "Story of The Eye" ("SOTE") was written twenty-nine years before EDAS and yet the link between the two works is obvious. As other reviewers / critics have noted, it appears that Bataille ultimately derived his fully fleshed-out concepts (pun intended) from the ideas that are present in SOTE. This book ends up resembling a satire of pornography; it's so extreme as to be ridiculous. The reader is introduced to vaguely-sketched characters whose participation in drastic objectification overtakes their respective personalities. All of these "non-characters" are very young, precocious and seemingly lacking in innocence. They use each to other live out their fantasies, by means of bizarre fetishes, that fuel an ongoing excitement that inevitably doubles as torment. By doing so, the main players melt and meld into a Dionysian "oneness" where personality disappears and the reptile brain takes over. Within SOTE, the characters break away from the confines of any previous social conditioning. Nothing herein is appropriate; the artifice of civilized decorum plays no part in this work. The reader immediately becomes the "voyeur" in a world where behavior resulting from uninhibited sexual appetite can result in grave consequences -- Particularly within the context of transgression. In Closing: the moral of this story is: Since sexuality is amoral -- Anything goes. Although hopefully one can accept the fact that "anything goes" can be disgusting as well as inhuman. But to each his own: One man's / woman's revulsion is another's stimulation. ( )

Even with the Barthes essay (read that first, and knowledge_lost's review below), this can't raise itself above "an edgy blogpost", which these days you'd expect if you asked GPT to write something to offend 4chan. The writing process must have been something similar: no real narrative, certainly no "erotica", just choose the next phrase on the basis of what would be most outrageous.

The Sontag essay adds little, as it's primarily about a different text (The Story of O) and most of its points just can't be applied to a text as fragmented as this one. ( )

I'll be the first to admit, I should have read a few reviews, and maybe the blurb again before picking up this book. It was only after I was finished, that I realized this author also write Mexican Gothic, which I did not totally enjoy, and that's on me.

What the blurb isn't telling you, is that this is a coming of age romance. The story is centered around Doctor Moreau's daughter, and her becoming a woman, and discovering the true nature of men in her life, and in general.

It took me a month to read it because at no point was any part of the plot drawing me forward. It was interesting to see this take on Doctor Moreau, and the author paints a beautiful world, with ties to real life troubles of the area in historical lights, but the plot did not have any hook.

The last 25% of the book is where the 'action' happens, but is more of reactions, which falls flat. There are great bones to this story, it just wasn't the adventure I had hoped for.

If you are looking for a coming of age story, with twists this is a book that you'll love. Especially if you are interest in historical fiction based in Mexico books.

Thank you to Net Galley for providing me with a copy of this book. ( )

Essentially an edgy blogpost which probably served as blueprint for what was being posted on Tumblr around 2015. ( )

Puede decirse sin temor que Historia del ojo es la obra maestra de la literatura erótica. En ella confluyen, por un lado, la mejor prosa en clave surrealista de este gran novelista, ensayista y poeta francés y, por otro, la esencia de su obsesiva preocupación por el sexo, la muerte y la fe -su fe- que configura, en realidad, gran parte de su obra. Partiendo de un proceso creativo muy querido de los surrealistas, relaciona, en una trama anecdótica de hecho muy simple, las imágenes que de un modo inconsciente y automático evocan el ojo, el huevo, el sol, los genitales del toro, con toda su carga de connotaciones atávicas, y nos las «revela» en su contenido erótico más revulsivo. El personaje de la joven Simone, que transgrede en todos sus actos cualquier norma de comportamiento sexual admitido, moral y conscientemente, es la encarnación, por una parte, del Deseo inconsciente y, por otra, del Pecado, de lo Prohibido y por ende del Placer, que a su vez, por ser fruto del mal, no es más que portador del máximo castigo : la muerte. Así pues, el goce en su plenitud sabe siempre a muerte…