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Title: bumptious divertissement
Review: Mr Delany enjoys a widespread acclaim by critics and common readers: with good cause, his mastery of the language is outstanding and he knows perfectly how to develop a good story.Both qualities are to be found and appreciated in "Phallos" too but an author so esteemed must perforce keep his standards extremely high.In this work he choses a literary topos: he feigns he has found an older work by an unknown author, a pornographical novel set in the late Roman empire and he engages the reader in a witty, cultured commentary on this novel, inserting erotic excerpts from the same.Problem is, his "commentary" is not witty enough to stand on its own feet, and the excerpts, though teasing enough, are not so outright erotic as to give satisfaction at least in that way.To read this work is just like reading an interesting literary essay (with some useless shows of erudition where the language is convoluted) about a work which does not exist.
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