Tonnie E. reviewed on 4/2/2006 + 8 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 3

By the time Paglia is done ravishing us with her visionary Egyptology and impudent synoptic judgements on the failures of feminism to give us an authentic sexual politics, the reader feels primed and whetted. Mistress Camille begins to flounder beneath the weight of her gushing, declamatory syntax, pounding and thrashing us with repetition and overemphasis, the voice of an S/M dominatrix sliding mushily into self-parody. As John Updike soberly put it, "It feels less a survey than a curiously ornate harangue. Paglia throws around the word "chthonic" like Heidegger pimping "Dasein." When fiery intellectual hubris finds its phantom gemini in the anguished erotic gravity of high art and literature, the book simply rocks. Paglia's energy and brilliance open up fresh horizons of speculation, at times verging on the ridiculous but always delivered in a high operatic style.

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