Granta 110: SEX edited by John Freeman (Granta)
One can’t blame the folks at Granta for waiting 110 issues before delving into Sex. It is a risky business, writing about sex — it may well be the easiest topic to get very wrong and make for horrifically embarrassing literature. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that writing about sex means writing erotica, which not many since Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller have got right.
But that’s not what it necessarily means. The editor of the quarterly writing journal, John Freeman, says in a podcast about the book that “the writing of sex is not supposed to arouse, but is supposed to be about character” — which is exactly how this journal unfolds, even though it does sometimes leave you wondering what the connection is between the topic and the story.
However, it is beautiful to watch as writers allow the concept to guide the story without being forcefully present.
It also expresses one of the natures of sex — how it forms such a predominant part of our awareness even when we’re not doing it. We’re thinking about it, wanting it, wanting to have it with different people, thinking about not having it — it’s always somewhere in our subconscious, along with water and air.
The front cover is a great example of this — a very witty photograph of a bright pink purse, opened wide and shot from above. An innocent object, but one that elicits a fair number of gasps at first glance. It’s always there, always lingering, always waiting to be had.
Japanese Natsuo Kirino, an addition thanks to Freeman’s international outlook, is outstanding in Tokyo Island, a story about what happens to human beings in extreme survival situations, where food and sex are the only means for establishing some degree of civilised normality.
Mark Doty’s story about being married to a woman and in love with a man, although not new in expressing the pain that comes with suppressed homosexuality, resounds so strongly because of the overwhelmingly tangible difficulty that comes from writing about desires that cannot be fulfilled. Doty admits to being able to write this story, The Unwriteable, only after both his wife and lover had died.
Then comes the more obscure. It’s great to see an African writer in Brian Chikwava weaving a story about civil war in Zimbabwe with a dirty, snake-like dance craze that prevented assassinations and linked guerrillas and grandmothers.
Tom McCarthy’s The Spa juxtaposes animal disgust with the sweetness of the youthful crush on his crooked-backed masseuse of a young boy with chronic constipation, showing the fine line between the two, and the gross physicality of the sexual act.
The most blatantly sexual story in the classical sense revolves around the natural desperation for sex. Emmanuel Carrere’s letter to his girlfriend in a French newspaper leads her through a public masturbation and creates a reality show-type game for her to pass the time.
Victor Lavalle’s Long Distance about phone sex between two temporarily sexually sad individuals, one obese and the other middle-aged, is one of the most honest pieces of literature I have read in a long time.
Then there are the poems — this edition has four as opposed to the usual single offering, and Carl Phillips and Anne Carson write touching works, both more related to the broader concept of sex, its circumstances, consequences and worldly branches than to the act itself.
Dave Eggers does an amusing series of drawings, titled Four animals contemplating sex, though his fans might be disappointed not to receive a literary offering instead.
Jo Broughton’s photographs of empty porn sets brings back the commercial, cold side of sex, perhaps also explored in the purse on the front cover.
Most of the pieces in this edition blur the lines between fiction and memoir and after a while I stopped caring. How much of any story about sex is completely fiction anyway? All are mostly, helplessly, drawn from the artist or writer’s own experience, as would be a story about eating or breathing.
For a subject that could easily have been misrepresented by pretentiousness and comic erotica, this collection does well to stick to honest, down-to-earth sexual experiences and issues — the only way to go, really, for something so deeply ingrained in all of us and, therefore, so easy to criticise.