Linda's Strange Vacation

Marcus Huttning

Ah, incest. Pornographic writing has always focused (obsessively, some might say) on what's taboo in society, and explored it. In detail. Probably in more detail than you would really want to read.

Olympia Press' webpage calls Linda's Strange Vacation "One of the few 50s-era Paris books not by Olympia that's worth republishing." (Note: I corrected punctuation in that quote.) One quails at the thought of reading 50s-era Paris books (of pornography, again, one assumes) that weren't worth reprinting, considering how incredibly distasteful Linda's Strange Vacation is.

If you really need a plot synopsis, Linda goes to spend a weekend with her Uncle Arthur, cousin Robert, their maid Alice, and Arthur's young girlfriend Lola. Things that one can't really call complications ensue.

As with the majority of pornographic novels, there's nothing of a plot to get in the way, little dialogue, and polymorphous positioning. I've long held a theory that every pornographic novel published since 1928 has been a knockoff of Story of the Eye. This may well be true of Linda's Strange Vacation, but, like most pornographic novels, the very elements that make Story of the Eye such an uncomfortable pleasure to read (not just the fact that everyone has sex, and lots of it, but all the underlying reasons for them having sex, and Bataille's gleeful explorations of why they're all having sex) are, of course, absent, leaving one with nothing but a series of sex scenes strung together, some of which (especially towards the end of the novel) will only be erotic to certain fetishists.