russellsmith.ca Diana

In the tradition of erotic confession, as delicately written as the tales in Anais Nin's Delta of Venus and as troublingly explicit as Reage's Story of O, Diane Savage's first novel is a memoir of female desire. The unnamed narrator gorgeous, sophisticated, bored, and underemployed embarks on a series of intense urban encounters and relationships, which she describes in wryly satirical tones. Her desire is limitless: it is toe-curling desire, desire like fire. And she follows that desire without reserve, with both passionate abandon and humour.

Diana: A Diary in the Second Person is a literary experiment, a modernist tale told in deft prose, whose goal is to arouse and to paint a sexual portrait of a city.

"In Diane Savage's pseudonymous debut -- the author is a well-known Canadian novelist -- Diana is not 'I' or 'she,' but 'you.' The pronounal thrust here is appropriative, and very thrusty indeed. You will have a lot of sex in this book. Not since Scott Symons wowed (among others) Margaret Atwood and Northrop Frye with the erotomania of Helmet of Flesh, 20 years ago, has such a baldly carnal novel made its bid for our nation's armchair lechers."

Quill and Quire

"...your author gets inside your armour of flesh, turning a chronology of aimless desire into a story of much deeper longing, ending in a perilous, glorious leap of faith. The button that pins down this lacy tale is well worth the wade through Savage's seminal and vaginal flood."

The Globe and Mail