Baise-Moi (Rape Me)

By Virginie Despentes

Baise-Moi is one of the most controversial French novels of recent years, a punk fantasy that takes female rage to its outer limits. Now the basis for a hit underground film which was banned in France, Baise-Moi is a searing story of two women on a rampage that is part Thelma and Louise, part Viking conquest. Manu and Nadine have had all they can take. Manu has been brutally raped, and determines it's not worth leaving anything precious lying vulnerable -- including her very self. She teams up with Nadine, a nihilist who watches pornography incessantly, and they enact their own version of les vols et les viols (rape and pillage) -- they lure men sexually, use them up, then rob and kill them. Drawing from the spiky cadences of the Sex Pistols and the murderous eroticism of Georges Bataille or Dennis Cooper, Baise-Moi is a shocking, accomplished, and truly unforgettable novel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B005UVZDRY
• ISBN13: 9780802138705
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.69 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

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Virginie Despentes is an anti-stylist. In her prose, she tries to capture the rhythm of the popular, nonliterary mind. She's against aestheticism and the literary aesthetic, much like the avant-garde writer Cathy Acker was. What she hopes to do in this book is to enter directly into the minds of alienated, abject characters, without poeticizing them. This is a very difficult task, and she succeeds beautifully. The translator tried to match this naked, gritty voice as exactly as possible. Those readers who didn't like the book or its style obviously didn't get it, or had to shut their minds off to this harrowing experience of alienation. But this is a very human, deeply touching book. It's brave and uncompromising. The French understood this, but the book has been sadly neglected in this country.