Permission

by Saskia Vogel

Overview

When Echo’s father gets swept away by a freak current off the Los Angeles coast, she enters a state of paralysis. The failed young actress seeks solace in the best way she knows: by losing herself in the lives of others. This time it’s with her new neighbor, a dominatrix named Orly who works out of her suburban home, and who introduces Echo to a whole new world of desire. But Orly’s fifty-something houseboy won’t quite let Echo slip into sweet oblivion…


Set among the bright colors of L.A., Permission is a kind of love story about three people sick with dreams and expectations who turn to the erotic for comfort and cure. As they stumble through the landscape of desire, they ask themselves: how do I want to be loved?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552453803
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	04/09/2019
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Saskia Vogel’s provocative debut novel, Permission , is like a trick box full of sliding panels. Her protagonist, jarred loose from her life by the accidental death of her father, finds that the boundaries she’s always taken as given begin to slide open, revealing secret zones of power and sexuality within the world and within herself. Beautifully written, mysterious and compelling." — Janet Fitch

Interviews

Saskia Vogel grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. She has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as Granta, The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Her translations include work by leading female authors, such as Katrine Marcal, Karolina Ramqvist and the modernist eroticist Rut Hillarp. Previously, she worked in London as Granta magazine’s global publicist and in Los Angeles as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on the business of pornography and adult pleasure products.

Editorial Reviews

01/31/2019

Vogel’s short but searching debut novel plunges below the physical aspects of BDSM relationships to revel in her characters’ emotional longing. Echo has spent her life afraid of breaking down, isolated by her feuding parents, and unsure of herself. She uses her acting career to hide from herself and the world. When her father is swept away by an ocean current and drowns, Echo loses her sense of self entirely. The only person capable of making her feel alive and present is her neighbor Orly, a professional dominatrix who works out of her suburban home and tutors Echo in the art of dominance. Orly’s older houseboy, nicknamed Piggy, sees through Echo’s attempts to lose herself in Orly’s work and helps Echo find the courage to embrace all she feels and desires. Vogel’s prose elegantly frames this study of embodied feminine sexual power at the expense of the plot, which feels hurried and unfulfilling. Though not entirely engaging, this daring and thoughtful study of love, loss, and pain rewards the patient reader. (May)

Publishers Weekly

2019-02-18

Echo, a Hollywood almost-was, is aging out of her chance at stardom. Then she meets Orly and Piggy—a dominatrix and her submissive—whose tender partnership helps her redefine what it means to give and to receive.

At 25, Echo seems to have missed her shot at the big time; she's foundered on the edges of a Hollywood career, toying with advertising, modeling, even the idea of high-end sex work but always returning to the inertia of hustling for bit parts and living off cash infusions from dad. Then, on a trip home to the Santa Monica-esque hills outside the city, Echo witnesses an accident that results in her father's death. Her grief is claustrophobic, raw, and immobilizing. Though complicated by Echo's difficult relationship with her thorny mother, her paralyzing sense of loss bogs down a character already mired in the fog of her unclear ambitions, and its haze threatens to submerge the book entirely. Fortunately, Echo's miasma is pierced by a second, more dynamic character's perspective. Piggy is one of Echo's new neighbors, a 50-something submissive and the antithesis to his housemate and dominatrix, the stunningly erotic Orly. Whereas Echo is a passive character, content to chronicle what she is offered in the heady descriptive voice that emerges as the author's strong suit, Piggy's desires are much clearer and more direct. His movement from the painful estrangement of his smothering marriage to becoming a member of a community that accepts him with both grace and ardor is nuanced and well-wrought. Meanwhile, the development of his relationship with Orly, his tumultuous rivalry with Echo as she assumes the role of Orly's new assistant and lover, and his eventual reconciliation with both his partner and his own hard-won sense of self are the triumph of the novel. A sensitive and sympathetic figure, Piggy enlivens Echo's character and allows the reader to view her as something other than a product of the cloud of privilege that seems to surround her.

An intimate study of power within two of the relationships that define us most precisely—that of lover and that of child.

Kirkus Reviews