Eroticism and literature have not always advanced so closely together, either as the basis of the erotic genre or as part of the plot that is normally assumed today. Because sex, its prolegomena, various presentations and extensive pleasures, moves through the letters like a Guadiana river as sinuous at times as buried by morality at others.
Because in civilizations here and there, prior to Christianity or any other Western derivative, there were naturally their good doses of sex. But everything was closed behind seven keys, as monotheistic beliefs advanced, depicting spirituality as the complete opposite of the body and its enjoyments.
It was one thing, for example, for the romantics of the nineteenth century to speak of love (or rather of heartbreak with fiery drives elevated beyond the carnal and the sensory), and another was for the most sibylline metaphor of sensual or sexual connotation had a place in Literature with capital letters for centuries and centuries.
But of course, humanity was always a flock with its black sheep. In the case of Marquis de Sade taken to the extreme of sexual vindication, of kinder filias, dark phobias and tastes in which pleasure, humiliation and death fiercely disputed that prevailing morality. As it got on, the Marquis de Sade he skipped the taboos with Olympic transgression, even hyperbolic or sickly.
Currently, the erotic literature seems like a new ship captained by enduring works of women like Almudena Grandes a few years ago before his departure and many other current pens born from the recent commercial boom of the genre that exploded with the shadows of EL James...
So, despite the profusion of works to read with that sensual tension, comparable in voltage to any other genre, and considering that the erotic can also be synonymous with narrative quality in form and substance, deep down 😉, let's go there with my ranking of best erotic novels of all time.
Top 5 recommended erotic novels
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Everything must be seen with the eyes it deserves. The fact that DH Lawrence surrendering to the erotic genre in this plot was yet another form of denunciation of the hypocrisy over which he always fought with his pen.
With this work, beyond the denunciation, he also ended up presenting one of the greatest classics of eroticism. Because all hidden love, all sensuality under the table, in secret, all fleeting love due to impositions ends up being frenetic and feverish like the hunger of misery.
It is the masterpiece of Modern Age eroticism, which was published in 1928; later he would know several censures of a society that did not understand that sensuality was an alternative to overcome human loneliness. Constance Chatterley had married the wealthy Sir Clifford in 1917.
But her husband was fatally wounded in World War I and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his days, paralyzed and unable to satisfy his wife. Retired in their country mansion, Constance watches her life and youth slip away.
She loves her husband, but she has to respond to the impulse of nature. And there, near the forest, her senses demand reparation: Oliver Mellors, the quiet ranger of the Chatterley lands, a strong, uninhibited, wild and passionate man, will take care of providing Constance with what her husband can no longer. give him.
The ages of Lulu
With the known ability to Almudena Grandes To brush up on those captivating characters that move in his extensive bibliography, it is always interesting to recover this story of a destiny marked, as it finally happens to all of us, by those sexual drives that define the brightest moments, the desires capable of liberating or destroying you, to mark you in the end forever.
This book is the story of an erotic, explicit and challenging learning, and also a disturbing love story that, with a shameless awareness of desire, does not hesitate to cross the line of some taboos or dark passions. Still immersed in the fears of a childhood lacking affection, Lulú, a fifteen-year-old girl, is seduced by Pablo, the friend of her older brother for whom she felt a secret fascination since she was little.
After this first experience, Lulú, eternal girl, ends up accepting the challenge of prolonging indefinitely, in her peculiar sexual relationship, the love game of initiation and submission, in a private universe where time loses value.
But the risky spell of living in a world outside of reality is abruptly broken one day, when Lulú, already thirty years old, rushes, helplessly but feverishly, into the hell of dangerous desires.
Ada or the ardor
Nabokov with this work he managed to raise eroticism to the altars of the most distinguished literature. The genre usually turned into a trunk of sexual passions, where the lurking morals always try to keep unsuccessfully what bothers them or worries them, had just reached the same level as the most transcendent and elegant of the fictional plots of its time.
Ada manages to summarize the sexual ardor with a spiritual warmth and that bothered me a lot at the time, as happened with other Nabokov novels, of course. Ada is a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parodic history of the fictional genre, an erotic novel, a hymn to pleasure and a vindication of Paradise understood as something that should not be sought in the afterlife but on Earth.
In this work, beautiful and complex, what stands out above all is the story of the encounters and disagreements between the main protagonists, Van Veen and Ada, the two siblings who, believing themselves to be only cousins, fell passionately in love on the occasion of their teenage encounter in the Ardis family estate (the Garden of Eden).
And now, on the occasion of Van's ninety-seventh birthday, immersed in the most pleasant nostalgia, they contemplate the various vicissitudes of their love, convinced that happiness and the most ardent ecstasy are within the reach of everyone who conserves the memory art.
The lover
Another lover, in this case that of Marguerite Duras. There are novels that transcend more for their social significance than for their stricter literary consideration. I do not mean that this novel is not an interesting story for readers of the intense plots about the sensual, or that it lacks literary value. What I'm going to is that finally the transformative reach that they achieve surpasses any other aspect.
And being this a wonderful novel that contains intensity and a suggestive narrative thread, to say that its social value is greater, its ultimate meaning elevates the author in the Olympus of liberating feminism, along with Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf o Jane Austen, as well as many others... We have all heard that the young girl protagonist of this story is an alter ego of Marguerite Duras.
His approach to carnal love with an adult and wealthy man touched, and still borders on the consideration of instrumentalized sex in which the woman comes out badly (I mean minds incapable of considering women on an equal footing with men).
The discovery of this physical love, however, is liberating, experiential, open to the world and to the figure of women as a free being who does not need to remain under the tutelage of social morality.
Tropic of Cancer
The first novel of a kind like Henry Miller, full of concerns but already in a mature age where disappointment usually rules over fantasies, ended up being a success precisely because of that, because of his openness to the world as a guy determined to awaken consciousness not towards revolution but towards grotesque and the tragic joke that is to think that something could make sense.
The only way out for absolute lucidity is the surrender to the physical, to the flash of orgasmic happiness, to the denial of hope as the only way to achieve calm in a vital becoming planned towards defeat.
Hence, the novel unfolds as a strenuous search for sex and its redemptive possibilities. Paris becomes, under the prism of Henry Miller, a wonderful city without a city, a purgatory made a city of light and passion where Miller sometimes stops to scrutinize the souls that cross history.
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