Gentlemen Callers

 
Gentlemen Callers

by Corinne Hoex

translated by Caitlin O'Neil

Dalkey Archive
2017, reprinted 2022

 

 

Gentlemen Callers is maybe halfway between Hilary Leichter's Temporary and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but for sex.

 
Each night, an unnamed woman, who is presumably a partially-fictionalized version of Hoex herself, dreams of a sexual encounter with a man she's encountered in her waking life, mostly men with service industry jobs. 

 
Each chapter, each dream, is a vignette, maybe 1 - 2½ pages long, and introduced with an epigraph vaguely about the man's profession quoted from the French literary canon. Each vignette seems like the amplification of someone's passing thought when she spots a good-looking stranger, magnified and expanded into an imaginative, poetic wet dream.

 
In one dream, Hoex is a cloud, and a pilot flies around and through her until she rains. In another, she is the sand, and the beach attendant rakes her. She's a Persian cat, and the groomer brushes her until she offers her belly. She is a stream, and a construction worker splashes her on his face and chest to cool off before drinking his fill. Hoex seems to like men who are skilled with their hands.

 
In some dreams, she stays human. In a few, she ends up disappointed. Her adventures are mostly told through metaphor and analogy, but Hoex also isn't afraid of a simple dirty pun (as when she snuggles close to a beekeeper to avoid being stung but still feels a little prick), or a straightforward porn scenario (as when she watches the butcher work, he asks her if there's anything else he can do for her, and she answers knowingly, 'I think perhaps there is.')

 
This is a short book, but it's better not to read it too quickly. Hoex's encounters with her gentlemen aren't usually smutty in a conventional way, but you can also enjoy the breadth of her imagination and her playful, joyous use of language. While I can't independently verify the quality of O'Neil's translation, the syntax here seemed agile and playful, which matches the tone set by the content, so I think it's faithful in that sense.