Deflora
Møller, Preben Z.: Deflora”The whole town has turned innside out. The wires and the buildings. The slum It’s mid day, but girls are still hanging around in the bars. They call out at me ‘Helloooo sexyman!’”
Preben, an over-the-hill Norwegian intellectual decides to turn his back in his homeland. He is sick of churning out newspaper chronicles, sick of “culture bodies”, sick of being rejected. He wants to get away, and on an impulse buys a vacation in Thailand. In the dirty city jungle of Pattaya, among disillusioned prostitutes and middle aged men, he meets the much younger girl Pom. She awakens something in him, giving him the opportunity to become another person than the one he has been up to now.
A dark novel about the nature of sex tourism and the encounter between “natural” love and advancing age, DEFLORA calls to mind such novels as Michel Houellebecq’s Platform and Nabokov’s Lolita as well as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
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Praise for DEFLORA:
"The combination of the main character’s development and the formal composition of the novel, makes DEFLORA an interesting and thought provoking work of responsibility and desire."
(Adresseavisen)
"… Møller neither defends nor preaches against Thailand’s sex industry. Instead he seeks to give a realistic portrayal of a brutal sex market, seen predominantly from the perspective of the horny men who buy sex … It’s precisely in the sparse business like dialogues and the realistic portrayal that the book’s strength is to be found."
(Dagbladet)
“The novel describes very well the mutual debasement that both customer and prostitute partake in when the need for sex meets the need for money. The author succeeds in arousing our grudging sympathy for the outcast dirty old man. The 52 year old’s ridicuolous love for the 18 year old prostitute is as blind and sweet and genuine as any … Neither reader nor author have to defend the main character’s unacceptable and ignoble actions. Instead we are forced to accept that the whoremonger Preben (52) is a human being.”
(Aftenposten)
First published: 2009, Aschehoug
Preben Z. Møller: Biography and bibliography
