A man watches pornographic scenes on a TV screen. But he does not look at actors playing. The young woman who submits to the desires of her unknown partner is the author of the astonishing and incorrect book The sexual life of Catherine M.
How all this has started ? Surprised, embarrassed, indifferent or sometimes amused about what is revealed to him by gestures and sighs, Jacques Henric tries to tell. But how to tell a love life? The grace of the first meeting, the fascination for the young woman without interdictions who declares herself being “beyond evil”? Literature, from Proust to Bataille, from Sade to Anaïs Nin has always been telling the joy of sex, the abyss of love, the violent experience of jealousy. Who is the young woman on the screen? A humiliated victim or a perverse goddess? She is the beloved woman, the one whom he looks at while she is sleeping. In his writing, Jacques Henric puts up his total love, his deep tenderness against the violence of the images he sees on the screen. And he expresses his conviction: “At the end of the end, there will always be the two of us”. This is not a book about sex, but a hymn of love, of foolish and unconditional love.

Jacques Henric was born in Paris in 1938. A teacher from 1960 to 1985, he has collaborated in the Sixties with the Lettres Françaises, a cultural magazine directed by Louis Aragon. He has published his first novels in the famous collection Tel Quel. He has written several novels and essays like La Peinture et le mal (Grasset, 1983), L’Habitation des femmes (Seuil, 1998) and Légendes de Catherine M. (Denoël, 2001).