Bad Sex Awards 2009!

It's my favourite time of the year: the announcement of Britain's Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Award 2009!

This year's winner is Jonathan Littell's novel, The Kindly Ones, with this seductive passage:

'I whispered to her: 'I'm going to pull the lever, I'm going to let the blade drop.' She begged me: 'Please, fuck my pussy.' – 'No.' I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.'


It also includes this passage:


the author compares a woman's genitalia with 'a Gorgon's head ... a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks.  If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone.'


Sheer genius!  Other personal favourites from this year's shortlist include:


From Ten Storey Love Song, by Richard Milward


'Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina.'


From The Humbling, by Philip Roth


He had let Pegeen appoint herself ringmaster and would not participate until summoned. He would watch without interfering. First Pegeen stepped into the contraption, adjusted and secured the leather straps, and affixed the dildo so that it jutted straight out. Then she crouched above Tracy, brushing Tracy's lips and nipples with her mouth and fondling her breasts, and then she slid down a ways and gently penetrated Tracy with the dildo. Pegeen did not have to force her open. She did not have to say a word – he imagined that if either one of them did begin to speak, it would be in a language unrecognizable to him. The green cock plunged in and out of the abundant naked body sprawled beneath it, slow at first, then faster and harder, then harder still, and all of Tracy's curves and hollows moved in unison with it. This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though, in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. She could as well have been a crow or a coyote, while simultaneously Pegeen Mike. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze.


John Banville was once again included this year.  The first time I encountered the Bad Sex awards, I remember quite vividly the description from his novel of a dolphin entering a ring to describe the act of intimacy...


For more hilarious (but endearingly chosen, and always with good humour) selections for this year's awards, go here, and for the article on this year's winner, go here.  The Bad Sex awards is in its sixteenth year of celebrating mediocre descriptions of sex in the modern novel.