The Book Club Blog - Who is Belle de Jour?

     
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004

'Moore is shameless in feeding his own ego'

Mark Kermode on Michael Moore

All blunderbuss and bile: Kermode review of Fahrenheit 9/11

Posted by Nick @ 21:16 GMT
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Sunday, July 18, 2004

Book Club Blog Reading Habits

Here are the details of the number of clicks through to Amazon attracted by The Book Club Blog's featured books in the first half of this month:

Traffic by Item - Click Throughs Report
From Date 2004/07/01
To Date 2004/07/16
Item Name /Clicks

-Atomised 7
-Belle De Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl 7
-American Psycho 3
-Samarkand 4
-Story of O 1
-The Whitsun Weddings 1
-Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl: A Novel 5
-"Belle De Jour" (BFI Film Classics) 1
-The Corrections 7
-Brass 5
-One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed 23
-Sexual Healing 5
-Girls 12

Is it fair to conclude therefore, that among people who tend to purchase Philip Larkin poetry the most interesting book of the moment is not "Belle De Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" but rather "One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed"?

Melissa Panarello, 18, says that her bawdy novel, One Hundred Strokes of the Hairbrush Before Going to Sleep, is a very realistic picture. The book has sold 500,000 copies, and rights to publish it have been sold in about a dozen other countries.

- "A Teenager Takes Italy by Storm, With Her Tale of Lust,"Frank Bruni, New York Times, December 24, 2003 (Site registration required)

Posted by Nick @ 13:32 GMT
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Monday, July 12, 2004

First Guardian Picture of Belle de Jour (or is it a generic picture?) as she almost makes it into the Media Guardian 100

A picture of the back of Belle's head from The Guardian

"Sneaking in at number 10, (in the New Media Top 10) anonymous call girl blogger Belle de Jour, who sparked a ludicrous media guessing game over her identity that led to a book deal for the author, makes the list as a representative of the millions of online bloggers and the year that blogging went overground."

via Google trumps Microsoft in UK power elite

Meanwhile, LinkMachineGo points out that Belle's novel "Belle De Jour: Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" has been given a synopsis at Amazon:

Synopsis
Belle de Jour is the diary of a London call-girl. The author will remain anonymous, but she's from a nice middle-class family, in her late twenties, writing a phD who writes about her rather unusual job with humour, affection and honesty. This isn't a salacious catalogue of sexual encounters, rather it's the unfolding story of her life: the difficulties in juggling her very understanding boyfriend with her profession; the question of what to wear to work; the problems associated with managing pubic topiary and the often hilarious hypocrisies she bears witness to every day. And of course, there's the odd sexual encounter thrown in for good measure... It's witty, compelling, educative and oddly moving. Belle is a twenty-first century Moll Flanders who will appeal to women because of her honesty and guts, and to men because she lifts the lid on what call girls are really thinking...

- Here's the Daily Mail's account: "Who IS Belle de Jour?" by Paul Bracchi (via LinkMachineGo) In case anyone missed it at the time.

I suspect we may see a renewal of interest in dear old Belle....

Posted by Nick @ 14:21 GMT
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Keith Richards Leads Tribute to Old Pal Parsons

"We osmosed a lot!"

Posted by Nick @ 09:14 GMT
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Wednesday, July 07, 2004

A film maker blogs

Mike's Blog

Posted by Nick @ 22:10 GMT
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Monday, July 05, 2004

Beck de Jour update

David Beckham continues to be Wayne Rooney's role model.

Belle de Jour isn't the only high profile author concerned with keeping their identity under wraps at the moment.

Having spent the past week or so reportedly telling close friends, "I don't know who I am any more," David Beckham has taken to wearing a jellaba whilst holidaying in Marrakesh in an attempt to prevent anyone else knowing either.

Posted by Nick @ 14:20 GMT
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Sunday, July 04, 2004

Belle de Jour is one among many!

According to The Telegraph, "Explicit sex is now used to lure young women readers": "Over the next 12 months British publishers will be launching an unprecedented number of sexually graphic books - fact and fiction - to appeal to a new generation of young women."

While we're on the subject, has anyone out there read "Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl" by Tracy Quan?
Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl is a wonderfully intelligent, sexually frank, rollicking novel that introduces us to Nancy Chan, a turn-of-the-millennium call girl who lives and works on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Nancy is full of contradictory desires; she frequently has to choose between making love and making money. On good days, she gets to do both. Surrounded by devoted, wealthy, and powerful johns, some of whom want more than just sex, and caught between two all- consuming call girl friends who complicate her life, Nancy navigates the tricky currents of the world’s oldest profession. With one foot in the bedrooms of her rich and demanding clients and one in the straight world of her unwitting fiancé, who has started to apartment-hunt and arrange a wedding, Nancy keeps her two worlds from colliding in her inimitable style. The Village Voice, August 29, 2001: A subversive riff on the Feminine Mystique-era question: Can you become a wife and still pursue a career? Or The Diary of Nymphomaniac, written by a Spanish prostitute, Valerie Tasso. A quest for love, affection, self-knowledge, recognition, and personal accomplishment... Or One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed, by Melissa Panarello, which the Pope issued a warning against reading? One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed is the fictionalised memoir of a highly libidinous Sicilian teenager, who seeks love and companionship through a series of heterosexual sexual situations, involving impromptu one night stands in the backseat of cars, spliff induced group orgies and S&M. Or Brass, by Helen Walsh. The story of an undergraduate in Liverpool who uses prostitutes to re-enact pornographic scenes, which was published earlier this year, insisted, however, that the use of sex was not always a deliberate ploy to increase sales, and instead was simply a reflection of modern life. Or Girls, by Nic Kelman, which tells the story of a series of men pursuing their sexual fantasies with young women. They include a father who leaves his family to spend the night in a girls' college dormitory and a company chief executive whose lust for a friend's daughter leads him to feign a broken ankle to sleep with the teenager.

Posted by Nick @ 13:00 GMT
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Thursday, July 01, 2004

The Corrections - The Book Club Blog's chosen book for the coming month

Thanks for inviting me on the show Oprah! I take myself a whole lot more seriously when I'm not on TV!

- Jonathan Franzen Homepage
- Oprah's Book Club: The Corrections (Announced September 24, 2001)

- The Atlantice Interview, 'Mainstream and Meaningful,' October 3, 2001.
"Jonathan Franzen, the author of The Corrections, discovers that, when it comes to fiction, "serious" doesn't have to mean "marginal" or "boring.""

- BBC Books Profile
"Despite adulation in literary circles since the publication of his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City in 1988, it wasn't until earlier this year that Jonathan Franzen became one of the world's most talked-about authors when he refused Oprah Winfrey's endorsement of his latest work on her TV book club."
- Salon, "Book lovers' quarrel," October 26, 2001, by Laura Miller, Salon's New York editorial director."Jonathan Franzen's dustup with Oprah exposes the deep rift between devotees of the "literary" and fans of the "popular.""
- On Jonathan Franzen's rejection of Oprah's Book Club endorsement.
- Jonathan Franzen and Oprah Winfrey Collaborate on Book
- Never judge a book by its clubbers.
"Richard and Judy were derided for attempting to intellectualise daytime television, but the success of their Book Club means publishers are now desperate to be part of their literary circle."

Posted by Nick @ 12:34 GMT
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A reading group, well an exclusive book club blog really, for connoisseurs of fine literature, books, clubs and blogs.


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Current Book Club Book

Boris Vian, L’Écome des Jours, 1947, Translated by Stanley Chapman as 'Froth on the Daydream'1967, 1970, 1988

Current Book Club Book on the Back Burner

Herman Melvills's 'Moby Dick

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Previous Book Club Books

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire - to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Senhor Jose is an official in a registry office, with a passion for unearthing every detail and reconstructing people's lives from the bare data in the archive documents. One file in particular challenges him: a woman's date and place of birth are missing, and so he begins his research in earnest.

The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it. Examine a boy and he is tamed already. Only examine him and you can tax him, empanel him, enlist him, interrogate him and put him in prison. You have only to grade him and you have got him. An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form boys in pursuit of sex, sport and a place at university. A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results and a history teacher who thinks he’s a fool. In Alan Bennett’s new play, staffroom rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

A panoramic vision of America at the beginning of the 21st century, seen through the turbulent lives of the Lambert family. This novel is a moving family drama and a dissection of American society in an age of greed and globalism.

A collection of poems from a tenderly observant poet who writes about what all of us can understand. The title poem describes the poet's journey by train from Hull to London, using the tones and rhythms of ordinary speech and focusing on the urban landscape of the industrial north.

Accused of mocking the inviolate codes of Islam, Persian poet Omar Khayyam fortuitously finds sympathy with the very man who is to judge his alledged crime. He is spared, and thus begins the blend of fact and fiction that is 'Samarkand'.

Half-brothers Michel and Bruno have a mother in common but little else. This is the story of two brothers, but the subject of the novel is in its dismantling of society and its assumptions, a dissection of modern lives and loves.

A debut collection of short fiction blends elements of Indian traditions with the complexities of American culture in such tales as

Koestler's story, first published in 1940, of an old-guard communist who falls victim to Stalin's purges, yet attains a personal freedom in his destruction.

This novel opens with the narrator in hospital after a serious car crash in which he killed a doctor's husband. When he leaves hospital, he revisits the scene of the crash, and meets the doctor. They begin an affair which involves sexual experiments on London motorways.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At forty, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Her days have fallen into domestic tedium and social isolation. Her nights are a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Leached of all confidence, Georgie has lost her way; she barely recognizes herself. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from the computer screen to see a shadow lurking on the beach below, and a dangerous new element enters her life. Luther Fox, the local poacher. Jinx. Outcast. So begins an unlikely alliance. Set in the wild landscape of Western Australia, this is a novel about the odds of breaking with the past. a love story about people stifled by grief or regret, whose dreams are lost, whose hopes have dried up. It's a journey across landscapes within and without, about the music that sometimes arises from the dust.

Writer Jake Donaghue's adventures in London and Paris include falling in and out of love, kidnapping a canine film star, and trailing a onetime friend.

Like its noteworthy ancestors (Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner and Moby Dick) Life of Pi is a tale of disaster at sea. Both a boys' own adventure (for grown-ups) and a meditation on faith and the value of religious metaphor, it was one of the most extraordinary and original novels of 2002. The only survivor from the wreck of a cargo ship on the Pacific, 16 year old Pi spends 221 days on a lifeboat with a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450-pound Royal Bengal Tiger called Richard Parker...

Into the intrigue and violence of Indo-China comes Pyle, a young idealistic American sent to promote democracy through a mysterious Third Force. As his naive optimism starts to cause bloodshed, his friend Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, finds it hard to stand aside and watch.

Patrick Bateman is Harvard-educated and intelligent. He works by day on Wall Street, earning a fortune to complement the one he was born with. His nights he spends in ways we cannot begin to fathom - doing impermissible things to women. He is living his own American Dream.

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