Sexuality

Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisiacos (Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses)

Name: Afrodita: Cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisiacos (Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses)
Author: Isabel Allende
ISBN: 9780060930080

by Isabel Allende, Robert Shekter

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Overview

"Me apprepiento de los platos deliciosos rechazados por vanidad, tanto como lamento las ocasiones de hacer el amor que he dejado pasar por ocuparme de tareas pendientes o por virtud puritana",ya que "la sexualidad es un componente de la buena salud, inspira la creacion y es parte del camino del alma. . .Por desgracia, me demoré treinta años en descubrirlo".

Synopsis

Publishers Weekly

Sex and food, once celebrated as two of life's great joys, suffer a lot of bad press these days. Genuine epidemics, coupled with monthly findings of new things that are bad for us, have pushed otherwise happy souls into programs of agonizing denial and, in severe instances, abstinence. Thankfully, in this sophisticated defense of pleasure, novelist Allende The House of the Spirits puts the joy back into eating and loving with all the panache that marks the best of her fiction. Though passionate about her subject, she remains consistently whimsical with this mix of anecdotes, recipes and advice designed to enhance any romantic encounter. As always, her secret weapon is honesty: "Some [aphrodisiacs] have a scientific basis, but most are activated by the imagination." Allende's vivacity and wit are in full bloom as she makes her pronouncements: "There are few virtues a man can possess more erotic than culinary skill"; "When you make an omelet, as when you make love, affection counts for more than technique." Her book is filled with succinct wisdom and big laughs. Despite sections titled "The Orgy" and "Supreme Stimulus for Lechery," Allende comes down emphatically for romance over sex and for ritual over flavor in a work that succeeds in being what it intends to befun from the first nibble to the last. (Apr.)

About the Author, Isabel Allende

Aristocratic Chile is vividly evoked in Isabel Allende s lyrical novels, in which a family s past and future is linked inextricably with that of its country s. A writer whose dreamy, imagistic books transport the reader to another time and place, Allende is considered by many to be the heir to Gabriel García Márquez s lavish magic realism.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Leslie Chess Feller

In Aphrodite, Allende turns the joyous preparation and consumption of fine food into an erotic catalyst; it culminates in a collection of serious recipes for your first - or next - bacchanal....Although Allende mentions exotica like shark fins, baboon testicles, eye of salamander and the urine of a virgin, her recipes use ingredients that "can be ingested without peril." --Leslie Chess Feller, The New York Times Book Review

The Washington Post

Like a slow, seductive lover, Allende teases, tempts and titillates with mesmerizing stories and legends about gluttony -- sexual and otherwise. -- The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

An elegant grandmother ponders the erotic side of food and the most delicious aspects of eros. The noted Chilean novelist Allende The House of the Spirits, 1985; Paula, 1995; etc. now lives in San Francisco. One day she put on dark sunglasses and a brassy wig and went down to a big porno shop in order to begin research for this "memoir." However, it's not a memoir in the usual sense; the graceful Allende doesn't kiss and tell. She is never crude or exhibitionistic, and she does not seek to shock her gentle readers. She aims to amuse, to titillate, and to entertain us with the lore of food and sex, a few choice morsels from her own experience and fantasy life, and occasionally to advise aspiring seducers and seductresses. This volume—part memoir, part research project, part cookbook—seeks above all to charm the pants off us, literally. And Allende has this ability. The tone of her prose is persuasively warm and inviting, but also down-to-earth: "The shells of oysters, those seductive tears of the sea, which lend themselves to slipping from mouth to mouth like a prolonged kiss, are hell to open. They can be purchased in bottles, but there they look like malignant tumors; in contrast, moist and turgid in their shells they suggest delicate vulvae." The tales and anecdotes she offers whet the appetites; and her tidbits of erotic lore are food at least for thought, and perhaps more. In addition, there are many recipes for sensual cooks, provided by her aged mother, Panchita Llona, and by the novelist's Spanish agent, Carmen Balcells. Illustrations, tastefully sensual, are provided by Robert Schechter. Peden's translation has verve and immediacy. Allende's "eroticmeanderings" give pleasure. She has a sure sense of the delicate relations between eros and writing. Her tact amplifies the eros that pornography kills.