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The Indiscreet Jewels Paperback – January 1, 1993
- Print length285 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMarsilio Pub
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 1993
- Dimensions5.25 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-100941419835
- ISBN-13978-0941419833
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Product details
- Publisher : Marsilio Pub (January 1, 1993)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 285 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0941419835
- ISBN-13 : 978-0941419833
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.25 x 1 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,183,430 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #537,363 in Literature & Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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I tried to read this novel the first time many years ago when I was learning to read French, and was happy to see it in translation (except for the occasional 18th century text on chemistry, I did not have the skill or patience to read any other books to completion).
While I would agree with other reviewers that it is not great literature (when compared with Flaubert, Zola, Proust, etc), it IS a good read.
In part this is for the sheer silly fun of a magic ring that causes vaginas to become indiscrete and tell tales of sexual adventure that would shame the efforts of boys in the locker room.
And partly this is for the historical insights a reader finds in The Indiscrete Jewels. As history of science, the novel is a good example of the active male scientist seeking the truth from passive female nature. As political history, the novel is a good example of how edgy intellectuals like Diderot (or like Galileo before him) had to suck up to royalty (in Diderot's case, King Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pampadour) in order to gain patronage or at least benign disregard.
It's a quick read, and I recommend it for anyone with a curiousity about those darned French were up to in the mid- to late-eighteenth century.
Favorite Diderot quotation: "There are little testicles at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness."
Only thing is, the women may not talk through their mouths but rather through their jewels .... meaning of course their vaginas .... WOW ... it's like a classical play of the current Broadway hit the Vagina Monologues ....
Thats really about where any similarity ends cause the stories and the writing are bad bad bad bad ..... Maybe the fact that this book was originally writtten in French and then translated into this English edition ....
If I were lost in the desert and this is the only form of entertainment available to me .... trust me I wouldn't read it .....
it appears nowhere in the kingdom is there a chaste woman, not even in the convent, and within the court all women have been unfaithful to their husbands and lovers. undone by the lack of virtues of her sex, the sultaness enters a wager with the sultan that a virtuous woman can be found. within the court, serving the sultan and sultaness is a sixty-year-old courtier with decades of experience with women that support the confessions of the talking jewels.
the conversations and stories cover the salacious, the obscene, the history of erotica, philosophies of morality and disquisitions on love, removing any doubt why the highly knowledgeable diderot was one of the french encyclopedists of the enlightenment.