Publisher's Synopsis
Science has never suffered a lack of explanations for the 'urgings of sex'. Yet while a catalogue of bodily juicings and endocrine secretions may go some way towards illuminating the mechanics of coupling, it does not, alas, offer any universal and enlightening theories of erotic love.
Still less does science go any way towards explaining the universal human experience of desire; which, as Sartre noted, in no way by itself implies the sexual act.
For Gonzalez-Crussi, the fact that speculation continues to abound on the who, the what or the where of human sexual impulse is a matter of irresistible attraction. Things erotic offer a magnificent canvas on which to ponder the nature of desire as perceived by philosophers, poets, scholars, practitioners of ancient and noble erotic arts, media massagers and sexual therapists alike.
Here is not only his own erotic awakening - 'as the ancient worshippers of Aphrodite travelled to sacred Cythera, I journeyed to the local dairy. The aroma of the essence of Syria was for me the smell of cream and pasteurised milk' - but also strivings after the very nature of Eros.
The author's first prize-winning collection of essays, Notes of an Anatomist, present intellectual incisiveness allied with scientific reason. With Three Forms of Sudden Death, reviewers likened Gonzalez-Crussi to Montaigne, to Lamb and 'Sir Thomas Browne, oddly admixed with a sort of medical Borges'.
