An Indecent Recollection is set in Barcelona in the winter of 1927, during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. But the story soon distances itself from these particularities of time and place. It relates the mad and despairing love of a man for a woman who will not be approached otherwise than by way of a curious ritual that, while assuring her sexual satisfaction, rigorously refuses his to him. When first published in 1992, this rich and unsettling novel caused a stir reminiscent of the one that enveloped The Story of O almost forty years earlier. Though considered for the Prix Goncourt, the author proved invisible, and the French publisher continues to keep the secret.
