Whore

A brief, breathless (heavily autobiographical) novelistic account of the life of a young woman who sells her body for a living, Whore is a searing look at the world's oldest profession and a confessional in the tradition of Sylvia Plath or John Berryman. "Cynthia," as the nameless narrator calls herself professionally, is a French-Canadian Catholic from the sticks who escapes her strict upbringing and stifling parents to move to Montreal as soon as she is old enough. One day she answers the ad of an escort agency, and quickly becomes compelled by her strange new calling. Visited by men including an Orthodox Jew cheating on his piety, a boorish Muslim with a deformed arm, a neverending parade of businessmen and fathers, and a young man whose youth and fitness disturbs her more than any of the rest of them, "Cynthia" delivers an unyielding, poetic, and deeply personal account of her whore's life. It opens innocently enough: the diary starts off with a tone of self-absorbed adolescent wistfulness. The fourteen-year-old Melissa starts taking notes about her feelings during a very hot summer. Her bedroom is plastered with Klimt posters and photos of Marlene Dietrich. She is a loner, fond of classical music. She examines her body in the mirror, pleasurably yet without desire. Her friend Alessandra introduces her to Daniele, an eighteen-year-old who intrigues her. She is embarrassed when he asks her if she is a virgin and she says yes. He invites her to his home to go swimming, and after cornering her in a secluded room and kissing her passionately, he asks, “Do you feel like doing it?" She declines coyly, but soon he is pushing her face below his waist. When she takes his penis in her mouth, he comes immediately. “Is this the way it's done?" she asks him. He isn't very nice to her, but the act fills her with a “strange contentment." The diary then jumps... Yes, life's gone right through me, I didn't dream these thousands of men in my bed, my mouth, didn't invent their sperm all over me, in my face, my eyes, I've seen it all and still do every day, or almost, tips of men, only their cocks, tip ends of cocks turned on by I don't know what, since it isn't me they're getting hard for, never has been, it's my whoredom, the fact that I'm there for that, to suck them over and over, gulping down these cocks one after another as if I were going to empty them once and for all, finally get what they have to say out of them, but anyway, I'm nothing when it comes to all this gushing out, it could just as well be somebody else, not even another whore but some doll made of air, a piece of some spun-sugar image, a mouth positioned at a leaking point that opens as they come from the idea that they have what it takes to make you come, as they get it on in the sheets, causing a face, hard nipples, a wet, quivering slit to materialize, as they try to believe that these bits of women were made for them and that they're the only ones who know how to get them off, the only "Prostitution is usually referred to as the world's oldest profession - and modern prostitutes are a class of professionals about whose lives we know very little, be they high-class call girls or streetwalkers. What leads a woman to enter this field? What is she really thinking as she entertains her clients? In Whore, Nelly Arcan's heroine, who goes by the name Cynthia, tells us in unvarnished terms exactly what her life is like