Book Review: Incognito by Lisabet Sarai

It might have crossed your mind that these days, I’m finding fiction elusive. It’s not that I don’t have stories to tell – I do. It’s that I can’t seem to find the passion to tell them at the moment. I have a lot of unfinished stories, and every time I put pen to paper, I seem to create another. For a while, I thought…if I just allow myself to keep on writing, sooner or later, I’ll be able to start finishing them. But no, I just began more and more stories that all became more novel length than shorts. So, I’m being firm with myself these days. If I can’t get it written in less than about 3,000 words, I won’t let myself write it. If I decide to embark on something longer, I am not going to allow myself to do it until I finish at least one of the unfinished pieces first. All that is to explain a little about why this blog is currently hosting fewer new stories and more discussion.

However, I have been doing quite a bit of reading. I recently finished Lisabet Sarai’s erotica novel Incognito. Here’s the blurb:

Shy and serious by day – insatiable by night.

Betrayed and abandoned by her first lover, shy and studious Miranda Cahill freezes in response to any sexual attention from someone she knows and likes.

During the day, she works diligently on her doctoral thesis. At night, though, she finds herself drawn into increasingly extreme sexual encounters with strangers. Her anonymous secret life begins to take over when she discovers that the masked seducer she meets in a sex club and the charismatic young professor courting her are the same man.

What I’m going to say right off the bat is that Lisabet and I are friends. She edited my collection of short stories, Coming Together Presents. And though we have very different writing styles and, I suspect, seek very different things in our writing, I respect her tremendously for her craft, for her ability to weave a compelling story and for her talent at writing incredibly hot erotica.

Unlike me, Lisabet knows how to get to the point. As a writer, she’s unconflicted about what constitutes erotic writing. Sex is never peripheral to her stories – it forms the very backbone of her narratives. And I find it liberating to read her. She reminds me that, past all the psychodrama (of which she writes her fair share, very well), desire should always be a driving force in erotic writing. This sounds obvious, but in fact, a lot of erotica is just a romantic plot with sex thrown in. Also, Lisabet is a smart writer. She knows when not to explain things. When to leave them as a question for the reader to answer on his or her own. For that reason, I will always think of her as a mentor.

So – Incognito. Please ignore the blurb. It’s a much, much better story than it sounds. The character of Miranda is a lot more complex, and a lot more compelling that the blurb makes her out to be. I guess those kind of blurbs sell novels, but they often turn me right off. Don’t be foolish enough to let this one turn you off.

What is interesting about this tale, is that it is essentially two – a classic narrative device that works very well. Two women, one in the modern day and one in the Victorian era, both chronicle their understanding of themselves and their exploration of their sexuality. Both live in societies that define the boundaries of their social roles and both lead secret lives in which they breach them in exhilarating and terrifying ways.

We are told why Miranda is commitment shy – why she only seeks out her liaisons with strangers. But Lisabet never really explores why either of these women have such immense sexual appetites or why they are, each in their own way, willing to trample so thoroughly on their respective social boundaries to satisfy them. I think this question is often left unanswered in the erotica genre. Perhaps it’s an unwritten and deeply feminist statement that it is: they indulge because they can. Because they want to. They climb the mountain because it is there.

I’m not personally a great fan of Victorian erotica. Publications like the Pearl, and My Secret Life, (The Sex Diary of a Victorian Gentleman), by Walter have always been a little too self-conscious for my taste. The Diary that Miranda finds, reads and uses as part of her doctoral thesis, is a much better piece of erotica than anything that was actually produced during the era. Nonetheless, Lisabet’s skill as a researcher shines, as does her ability to slip in and out of an archaic voice.

Beyond all this, there is just a tremendous amount of steamy hot sex in the book, and enough range of erotic incidents to ensure a wank-worthy passage or two for practically anyone.

Incognito is available as an e-book from Total e-Bound and as a paperback on Amazon