No Touching, Ketty Rouf
No Touching, Ketty Rouf
List: $21.00 | Sale: $14.70
Club: $10.50

No Touching

Author: Ketty Rouf

Narrator: Alex Picard

Unabridged: 6 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/05/2021


Synopsis

Prix du Premier Roman 2020
A story of liberation and a heartrending portrayal of a woman’s sense of self, Ketty Rouf’s extraordinary debut shatters tired prejudices about sex, women, and society.   
Josephine teaches philosophy in a high school in Drancy, a suburb of Paris. Her life is a balancing act between Xanax, Propranolol and Tupperware lunches in the staff room. The directives of the National Education Board are increasingly absurd and intolerable and she follows them with playfulness at times and derision at others. 
When, one evening, Josephine walks into a strip club on the Champs-Elysée, her life is completely overturned. There she learns a secret nocturnal code of conduct; she discovers camaraderie and the joys of female company; and she thrills at the sensation of men’s desire directed toward her. Josephine, a teacher by day, begins to lead a secret existence by night that ultimately allows her to regain control of her life. This delicate balance is shattered one evening by an unexpected visitor to the club where she dances.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul

You can hold a master’s degree in philosophy, and have cellulite and stretch marks, and dream of being a nude dancer. You have to cling to something, and what better to cling to than yourself? The body is weightier than an idea. No Touching is Tina Kover's translation of Ketty Rouf's 2020 Prix du Pre......more

Goodreads review by Jill

“Living means acting as if we aren’t born to die.” Many books have been written about women leading stultifying lives who break free from the boredom—usually through torrid affairs. But Ketty Rouf’s Josephine is a whole different woman entirely, a 30-ish philosophy teacher who breaks free from her bo......more

Goodreads review by Zoe

“Every woman, young and old, beautiful and less beautiful, should do this job. For one evening, or a month, or for their whole lives. They would really see men, know what they’re made of; it might save them a lot of suffering.” Synsopsis: Our heroine Josephine is a philosophy teacher who is burnt out,......more

Goodreads review by Sam

It was nearly impossible for both the narrator and the reader to tease out the earnest and the satirical, the pride and the shame, the feminine and the masculine, the real and the fake, the sex and the death. Yet we both end up seeing that each of these pairs is inextricably bound, leading into each......more