In this voluptuous and ridiculously salacious little book, Otte, author of several novels, short story collections and works of nonfiction (Love in the Garden), dishes up breathy commentary on the sex lives of creatures found at the beach, from sea urchins to seaweed to shellfish. Here in English translation is Otte's first-person account of a stay at the French seashore, told in the voice of a titillated voyeur. As Otte recounts what he sees while he peers furtively into tide pools, the reader has the sense of watching a nature program on public television, in which the narrator has begun to take the sex scenes entirely too personally. But the author does it with such humor and skill that it's hard to fault him. Among his offerings are chapter titles like "Private Secretions" and "The Moist Secret," in which he describes the reproductive intimacies of crabs, marine gastropods and shrimps. Much of the author's nature imagery is gorgeous, such as his description of colony mussels, which "obey the great primitive rhythms of the tides: they close, they cloister themselves in their own shadows, and then they reopen when the waves, breaking on the reefs and in the cavities with a magnificent roaring and splashing, return." The book ends with playful irony when, on a rock table beside the sea, Otte and his female host share a sensuous meal of the very the creatures the author takes such interest in. Otte serves up a rich, briny read in this unusual nature book, though some readers might find it too rich for their blood. (May)
