Discount Price: $7.99
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 843.912
EAN num: 9780345301116
ISBN number: 0345301110
Label: Ballantine Books
Manufacturer: Ballantine Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 204
Printing Date: January 01, 1992
Publishing house: Ballantine Books
Release Date: May 12, 1981
Sale Popularity Level: 5181
Studio: Ballantine Books
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The classic erotic novel, THE STORY OF O relates the love of a beautiful Parisian fashion photographer for Rene. As part of that intense love, she demands debasement and severe sexual and pychological tests. It is a unique work not to be missed.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
-
This is perhaps the best book I've ever read. For years I have had fantasies of torturing and abusing women. I used to feel guilty about this. But after reading this masterpiece, I now realize that women actually want to be tortured and abused, even if they cry and resist at first. It must be something inherent to the entire gender, I guess? Anyways, the good news is I no longer feel guilty. Thanks, Pauline Reage! You've changed my life.
Rated by buyers -
"O" takes us on a journey through the darkest parts of the female sexual beast: her hunger, her lust, and her desire to connect with her darker hidden self through the flesh of another.
From a woman's point of view "O" takes strides into the private spaces of a woman's mind, spaces even most modern women will not dare to go.
This story has an eerie depth to it. Filled with horrific torture, and yet, what is done to the body pales in comparison to what an obsessive love can do to the mind in this groundbreaking epic of erotic fiction. "O" is not simply a physical masochist, seeking pleasure in the pain her body feels, she is a submissive and an emotional masochist ... her desire for pain deeply embedded into her psyche, much like the main character in Masoch's Venus in Furs.
Love for "O" must be a torture all encompassing in its magnitude, and for that to be, one must surrender everything: mind, body, and soul.
A brilliant work.
Rated by buyers -
Maybe not for everyone, but this is one incredible story. Anyone interested in dominance and submission must read this.
Rated by buyers -
For love for her lover René, a young woman called O consents to be bound, humiliated, beaten and abused, marked, and prostituted. Trained at the château Roissy, graduated into her lover's personal care, and then gifted by René to an even more dominant master, O journeys through slavery--at very first happy only to please her lover, O eventually becomes proud of her identity as a willing slave. Balancing scenes of O's slavery with introspection into O's evolving thought, desire, and motivation, The Story of O is at once erotic, discomforting, and psychological. I was deeply impressed by the balance between these factors, and found the book thought provoking and all together wonderful. Very highly recommended.
It's difficult to critique the actual text of a translated work because the author's words are necessarily rewritten by the translator. The minor euphemism in the language (like "back entrance" for anus) sometimes feel weak, as if the writer lacks confidence. But for both of these defects, the book reads as swift and as slick as water. Cutting backstory to a minimum and never apologizing for the content, Réage approaches her topic boldly. At only 200 pages, the book moves swiftly through the different phases of O's training and her life as a slave, and these episodes are rarely repetitive but instead evolve into different forms of service, ownership, and punishment. Quickly intriguing and entirely engrossing, this is a difficult book to put down.
The novel is formed from a tripartite of elements: the erotic, the discomforting, and the psychological. The narrative voice of O's submission maintains a certain distance and is almost cold. As a result, like O, taught to keep her mouth open and her knees apart, the text is open and bare--and this naked honesty achieves an excruciating eroticism. The details of O's slavery, her beating and her prostitution, push the boundaries of generally accepted sexuality and are discomforting even as they are arousing. And weaving constantly into both the erotic and the discomforting are explorations of O's mental state. As O's servitude evolves, so does her mind. Initially, O consents to slavery at the behest of her lover, and find joy only in her lover's approval of her submission. However, as she continues down her chosen path and her relationship with René changes, O becomes increasingly proud of her role as a willing slave.
It is this introspection that gives the book depth and makes it truly wonderful: not just erotic, The Story of O is also psychological, an exploration of one woman's choice to become a slave. O's submissive role is not innate, it is learned. She becomes content. She discovers pride in her own debasement. O's story of submission is her own, and in Réage's voice is unapologetic--not all readers may agree with what O does. But O's motivations are real, as is the growth that she goes through as she continues along the path that she has chosen. It is rare to see a book that can so fully consume and combine both the body and the mind, but The Story of O does this precisely--for O, and perhaps also for the reader. The short book is quickly over, but it will remain in the reader's thoughts for a long time after as he comprehends and judges O's life. I expect that I will reread this book, and so I'm happy that I bought it. It is a brilliant example of its type--the philosophical erotic novel--and I very highly recommend it to all readers.
(On a side note: my biggest complaint about this book lies outside of the text itself, but rather with the mystery that surrounds it: the identities of the long-unknown author, the publishing editor, and this translator, as well as the editor's two-line conclusion to the book. Some online searches on The Story of O help clear up this mystery, but on the whole I find it only distracts from the book. I wish I had--and I recommend that other readers do--skip the various introductions to the Ballantine edition and concentrate instead on the text of the novel itself.)
Rated by buyers 
-
Years ago I read a Vanity Fair article about this new "hot" book - One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed by Melissa P - a supposedly true story of the sexual awakening of a 15 year old Italian girl. While searching for it online I read a review which recommended The Story of O instead as real erotica. Intrigued - especially since I had, of course, heard of Story of O as a "classic" and a somewhat naughty book with an infamous reputation - not unlike another French novel I love, Lolita, I also purchased Reage.
I could never put my finger on exactly what bothered me about the book. I found nothing of interest and found myself only and solely frustrated with this doormat of a "heroine." How could someone subject themselves to being treated as such an object, a possession of another person? How could anyone find anything erotic in tales of a woman being tortured? What kind of man is O's lover, who would require her to be treated as such? What kind of man would take pleasure from the pain of his supposed beloved?
I spent a lot of time studying the book - learning the history behing its inception and the controversy around its publication - and all the treatises written on feminist themes in the book - all of which I rejected. After all, isn't the very first tenet of feminism being the equality between the sexes, not the subjugation of one to another
I reject O and the book as relevant and erotic because it underscores the problems that still exist with women today. So many subscribe to the blind follower theory of love - they become nothing but vessels into which a man can pour his own desires, his own needs while she refuses to name any of her own. She nods her assent to every one of his requests and fears asking of him for fear he'll leave her. She "proves" her love by refusing to exist as her own person, instead trying to bind him to her by being sacrificial. But who can love what they do not respect and how can any man respect a woman who says, "Yes, hurt me in any way you wish and I'll do nothing but ask for more and smile with love towards you?"
I don't care at all for the S&M of the novel - perhaps my disinterest in such a thing strips the novel of any possible eroticism for me. But I can even understand how a little pain might be erotic - even Phoebe on "Friends" enjoys some "gentle spanking." But to put one's self into that level of depravity marks a person with such a truncated sense of self that they don't value themselves enough to reject being used and abused.
Outside of that, the prose is plodding and boring. It lacks depth and creativity. Judging against other erotica, it lacks any soul. It is a recitation of abuses without any context. We never find out why O is so flawed, why she would subject herself to such abuse. At least in Lolita you understand Humbert's flaws, which makes him a full fledged person and more than a cliche. O, however, flounders under disection. The plot lacks any theme and any connective tissue. The ending, as all scholars agree, is tacked on - revealing the fact that it was never to be published at all.
I think the book's fame is derived more from its controversy than its quality. If it weren't for the "who wrote it" mystery, there'd be little to recommend it as a book for the ages.
Find other books like this one:
