[ehib8yPc]

I agree with Titania that subtlety and sensuality can be arousing. Also the interweaving of love with sex, where it ceases to be the mechanics of copulation.

I don't believe, Lionel, that you democratise the argument by reducing literature to whether the grammar's OK. I'm not being airy-fairy, fancy-prancy about literature, I'm just saying that there are specific criteria that make literature. These are beyond the banalities of spelling and getting your grammar right. There are many criteria, and they are not weird, obscure or highfalutin. How Masoch does it, in square brackets:

1) Narration. Whether the book is told by the person experiencing the action, or by an observer. This makes a big difference of the point of view the reader has on what happens. [Masoch chooses a first-person narrator, an "I".]

2) Similar to 1). Inside or outside the character. The author can describe a character as he sees him, or add thoughts, as if able to climb into the character's head and read his thought. [Masoch's narrator knows everything, as it's the protagonist himself telling the story, adding the dialogue as it was.]

3) Setting. Is the book set in a real-life, recognisable setting, or in a dream world, a fantasy world, etc? [In a claustrophic indoor setting, sometimes, also outdoors, with negresses harnassing the protagonist to a plough.]

4) Does the author use ordinary language, or create a special atmosphere by using "fancy words"? [Allowing for the odd weird word, such as "kazabaika", he appears, if the translation is to be believed, to use ordinary language for his epoch.]

5) Is the dialogue living or stilted? Does it reveal all, or hint at things? [Masoch reveals all, in desperately stilted dialogue, if the translation is accurate.]

6) Length of time. Does the action take place within a short or long space of time? Are there flashbacks, or is it all in the past? Does it happen within 2 hours, 24 hours, or over many years? [?]

7) Is the imagery, the description, apt or overdone? [I would claim that a lot is overdone.]

8) Are the gender roles normal for the time of writing? How do they compare with the gender roles of today? [Women worship, of the most yucky kind. Not really in line with the equality of the sexes. I think that Masoch mixes emotionality up with emotion. There are lots of tears and sighs. As well as lots of lovely whipping.]

And so on.

You may note that both the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch ended their lives as madmen. Doesn't really surprise me. One amusing irrelevancy, gleaned from the Wiki, is that Sacher-Masoch was the great-great uncle of the British singer Marianne Faithfull. Bet she didn't dress up in the 1960s in non-poco furs and whip her lover.

One thing that intrigues me is what Masoch's original mother-tongue was. He was born in Lw?w (Lviv / Lemberg / Lvov) at a time when the main languages were Yiddish and Polish. He didn't learn German till the age of twelve. Like Kafka, Sacher-Masoch lived in a multilingual environment. That I find more interesting than his whips & black boots epic. And one curious co?ncidence: Masoch came only a few miles away from the town where Bruno Schulz was born and lived, Drohobycz. While Schulz wrote wonderful magical realist stories about his home town, he also had a penchant for masochism, and did some drawings of women dominating men (mostly his own alter ego), works of art which survived the Holocaust. But the masochism does not appear in his stories.