One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

One very hot Italian summer, a schoolgirl sits alone in her bedroom, staring at posters of Marlene Dietrich and listening to classical music. She strips before her mirror, examining her adolescent body pleasurably yet without desire. She writes: 'I want love, diary. I want to feel my heart melt, to see the stalactites of my ice shatter and sink in the river of passion, of beauty.' The narrator searches for love but the men she meets only want sex. With the pain of unrequited love comes the excitement caused by her discovery of the sexual power she has over men (and other women). This diary of a teenage girl's sex life is a work of deceptive innocence. Influenced by Nabokov and Anais Nin, it is both erotic and literary. When the book was first published, it was assumed that this could not be the work of a teenager. In fact it is the first novel of a young writer of great literary talent.

ISBN 185242866X   DEWEY 853.92 ISBN13 9781852428662 (What's this?)   DEWEY edition DC22 Publisher Profile Books Ltd   Pages 176 Imprint Serpent's Tail   Volumes 1 Format Paperback   Published in London Publication date 26 Aug 2004   Height (mm) 220 Translator Lawrence Venuti   Academic level General

"'Catherine Millet can go put her clothes on. Seventeen years old, Melissa P. has become a literary phenomenon in Italy... a real literary talent in the Sicilian fabular tradition of Giovanni Verga' Les Echos; 'I hope that when she officially becomes a 'writer' she does not lose the adolescent fervour of experiment and discovery' Il Manifesto; 'Rendered with a language much more elegant and precise than you would expect from a teenager' Corriere della Sera"

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