French woman's story of long-term celibacy stirs loins

Short, sharp guidance and observations from a journalist with attitude. All books available from Exclusives

IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

'The Maid's Version' by Daniel Woodrell (Sceptre) R220

BASED on a true story, in which a mysterious explosion at a Missouri dance hall in 1929 left 42 people dead, this slim yet extraordinarily layered novel recalls the night "all hell came callin'". Woodrell, author of the wonderful Winter's Bone, has been compared to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner - but mashed up with Nick Cave and Johnny Cash.

THE ISSUE

Will Swedish author Henning Mankell be swamped with demands to bring Kurt Wallander out of retirement when he appears at the Open Book Festival (Cape Town, September 7 to 11)? It's a situation Rebus creator Ian Rankin, another festival highlight, is familiar with. Perhaps the two could get together and discuss the matter.

Mankell has based several novels in Mozambique, where he runs a theatre for six months a year. His latest, A Treacherous Paradise, set in the early 1900s, tells the story of a Swedish woman who runs a brothel in Maputo. Open Book details can be found here: www.openbookfestival.co.za

CRASH COURSE

Sophie Fontanel's memoir, The Art of Sleeping Alone: Why One French Woman Suddenly Gave Up Sex, has stirred the loins of the chattering classes. Its "non-sex" passages, it seems, are not the dry matter of celibacy, but rather - say the more shouty notices - lush, sophisticated, sensual, full of the vulnerability of desire and erotic longing. Not everyone's impressed. The New York Times noted it is "very French", "slim, chic and humourless", and "drifts along on a kind of existential bearnaise of its own secreting".

Fontanel, who remained celibate for 12 years from the age of 27, found sex to be a platform for male dominion. Perhaps unsurprising, since she'd lost her virginity at 13 to an older man, and would come to regard sex as theft. And the benefits of abstinence? "I'd begun to glow," she writes. "My backbone was much straighter."

Another side effect was Fontanel threw out most of her books, volumes by Marquez, Camus, Woolf and others. "Their contents served no purpose. All they did was tell stories." Sex, like literature, is a messy business. Pop philosopher Alain de Botton put it rather neatly in his How To Think More About Sex: "It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should."

THE BOTTOM LINE

"Controversy was always something I wanted in the IPL." [Lalit Modi, creator of the Indian Premier League] - The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption, and the Spectacular Rise of Modern India, by James Astill (Bloomsbury)