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elfsA friend of yours has fallen in love. Hard. And he won't stop talking about it. Everything about his life now centers about his new love, his new obsession, and there are times, when you're sitting together at lunch, when you really, really wish he'd just shut up, because, y'know, he's really being an asshole about it.
He has New Relationship Energy Syndrome.
I'm reading Kushiel's Dart, and the author reminds me of this friend. She has wandered through the initial stages of association with the leather/kink community-- abhorrence, curiousity, investigation, participation, rejection, acceptance, embrasure-- and has now gone to that stage where she's madly, passionately, wholly in love with the very idea of S&M and the community that supports her participation. She now has a relationship with the leather/kink community, and it's so beautiful and so magnificent that she has to tell the whole world about it.
But she can't, really. Not about this. So she takes this New Relationship Energy and a degree in French History and she pours it out into this massive novel. And, like this friend, she wants to let you know every last detail about why she's so hooked, so into, this new and wonderful thing she's found, even if it's not your thing, even if you don't care.
I mean, when she uses the word 'algolagnia,' a word manufactured by the denizens of alt.sex.bondage for the sole purpose of sounding scholarly about whatever it is that they do, it just makes me want to toss the book at the wall, hard. Internet neologisms do not belong in novels set in a 17th Century pseudoFrance.
Don't get me wrong. Kushiel's Dart is a well-written novel with a nicely constructed fantasy world and some decent adventures. But great Ghu, I so want tell the author, "Honey, get over it already!"
[Edit] I found out, through an interview that I read of hers, that Ms. Carey is not into The Scene, but merely did a lot of research. If so, I'm impressed with the breathless way that she made Phedre seem. I'm also almost disappointed, in a way, that such energy could be written so convincingly. It makes it all seem so... capturable.
He has New Relationship Energy Syndrome.
I'm reading Kushiel's Dart, and the author reminds me of this friend. She has wandered through the initial stages of association with the leather/kink community-- abhorrence, curiousity, investigation, participation, rejection, acceptance, embrasure-- and has now gone to that stage where she's madly, passionately, wholly in love with the very idea of S&M and the community that supports her participation. She now has a relationship with the leather/kink community, and it's so beautiful and so magnificent that she has to tell the whole world about it.
But she can't, really. Not about this. So she takes this New Relationship Energy and a degree in French History and she pours it out into this massive novel. And, like this friend, she wants to let you know every last detail about why she's so hooked, so into, this new and wonderful thing she's found, even if it's not your thing, even if you don't care.
I mean, when she uses the word 'algolagnia,' a word manufactured by the denizens of alt.sex.bondage for the sole purpose of sounding scholarly about whatever it is that they do, it just makes me want to toss the book at the wall, hard. Internet neologisms do not belong in novels set in a 17th Century pseudoFrance.
Don't get me wrong. Kushiel's Dart is a well-written novel with a nicely constructed fantasy world and some decent adventures. But great Ghu, I so want tell the author, "Honey, get over it already!"
[Edit] I found out, through an interview that I read of hers, that Ms. Carey is not into The Scene, but merely did a lot of research. If so, I'm impressed with the breathless way that she made Phedre seem. I'm also almost disappointed, in a way, that such energy could be written so convincingly. It makes it all seem so... capturable.
