Cover Image: Permission

Permission

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Member Reviews

Saskia Vogel plunges us into sunny LA, where the weather can’t save you from yourself. Our main (female) characters look for their souls’ redemption and intimate connection thorough s&m and dominatrix relationships. The yearning and vulnerability of each of the characters are humanely and wisely illustrated.

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Permission is a very interesting insight into the complexities of grief and sexuality.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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I enjoyed reading this book. Echo has moved back home after her father disappears while walking along the ocean. Echo and her mother try and deal with their grief and guilt while living along the ocean near Los Angeles. When Orly, a dominatrix and her submissive move in down the street Echo finds herself drawn into their lifestyle. This book was a very quiet read and the writing was very good. I look for word to reading more by this author.

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This was a weird but powerful story about self-discovery and healing. I loved that this story features a less-known or even respected lifestyle and represents it in a manner that is honest and real. I was happy that this story didn't shy away from but really focused on some ugly parts of life. I enjoyed reading this book; it really made me think about things in a different way.

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it's never easy to write meaningfully about bdsm nor is it especially simple to tackle grief, but Vogel decides to attempt this in her debut novel and generally succeeds

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This was an interesting read but it felt a bit rushed in places and it could have been expanded much more, 100 pages was not really enough. The writing was generally good but there were a few points that seemed awkward and a bit poor in comparison to the rest.

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Comparisons between Permission and The Pisces are both understandable and reductive; understandable because sex-centric literary fiction set in Los Angeles is a pretty obvious comp, and reductive because sex and LA are pretty much where the similarities end. Where The Pisces excels, in my opinion, is in its refusal to sensationalize its explicit subject matter; Permission, on the other hand, never successfully avoids that trap.

Permission focuses on a young woman, Echo, who finds solace in the BDSM community after the sudden death of her father, when she befriends her neighbor Orly who happens to be a dominatrix. But what begins as a promising examination of sex as escapism from grief never really manages to take off. Echo, like her mythological namesake, is pretty much voiceless in this narrative, but in this case I don't think it was deliberate: this book is just one of those character studies that centers on a character who's drawn so anemically she may as well not exist at all. This goes for the other characters as well: there's an interesting passage where Echo reflects on the fact that she's been projecting onto Orly without fully realizing that she's a human being in her own right, but then nothing is really done with this revelation, and Orly too remains unknowable.

Rather than using sex and BDSM as a vehicle to explore Echo's loneliness (I think that was supposed to be the point), sex remains the focus in the shallow kind of way that I think could have been avoided if this story had a bit more depth and detail. I did enjoy Saskia Vogel's prose and there were undoubtedly moments of poignancy here, but on the whole I was underwhelmed.

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Definitely an eye-opener for me. Completely original and satisfying. The author's great content and good value kept me from putting the book down. Also, I took a special interest in the protagonist's unfolding character.

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A slender BDSM novella that's much gentler - and much less sexy - than that description suggests. I ultimately wanted less about the male sub and more about both women, but it was an intriguing swift read.

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The writing was stellar and the author flawlessly combined two topics seamlessly that did not seem like they should tie together. That being said the novel in general wasn't really for me. This is no fault of the author. I look forward to reading future works.

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I thought the premise was interesting enough, but I couldn't find myself being invested. Perhaps I was not the right audience for this, I practically sped through the last 100 pages.

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I often read whilst lying next to my 7 year old willing her to go to sleep – and somehow reading about BDSM when she could glance over at the ipad felt a bit inappropriate – so I didn’t tend to read it then.

So – what should have been a few hours read has turned into weeks on end, but I finally finished it this weekend.

Firstly – the writing is beautiful and really evocative of the Californian coast, and you really feel for Echo after the loss of her father and the strained relationship with her mother. However, I just didn’t really get the whole BDSM stuff – and some of the writing around it was a bit weird. It really wasn’t my bag at all – which is possibly why I was so easily distracted and didn’t devour it within hours, like other Netgalley readers have said they did.

It feels quite a ‘different’ book – how I felt about The Goldfinch when I read that (but thankfully it’s a tiny tiny fraction of the number of pages than Ms Tartt’s tome!)

I can see this being quite a marmite book – and I am definitely in the ‘don’t like’ camp.

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In her debut novel, Saskia Vogel explores human longing: "The hard part is most people don't know how to ask for what they want. They don't think they're allowed", says Orly, the dominatrix our protagonist Echo befriends after her father's passing - and just like her mythological counterpart, Echo fights the curse of not being able to use her own voice. The nymphe Echo could only repeat the words most recently spoken by another person and thus couldn't communicate with her beloved Narcissus. In this story, Echo loses the orientation her father provided and now needs to find her own way. While her German-born mother who feels like she accomodated her life around that of her husband now struggles to re-adjust in an environment that still feels foreign to her (the story is set on the fringes of Hollywood in 1994), Echo dives into the world of Orly who teaches her about power over oneself and others.

This is a feminist book with zero cliches, but very explicit sex scenes feat. BDSM and fetishism, so if you're squeamish, give this one a pass (this stuff is harder than The Pisces). We meet Orly's house slave Piggy who finds freedom in submission, role-playing Hollywood producers, and an older man who lashes out against people with a sexual orientation he doesn't want to accept, but the whole story is held together by Echo's deep grief and her struggle to free her voice in order to be able to talk to her inner Narcissus, to her own desires. Echo's father drowned, and again and again, Echo hears the sea roaring, outside and inside herself - she knows that she can drown, too, but maybe she could also master the natural powers inside herself.

It shows that Vogel, who was born in L.A. and currently resides in Berlin, used to be a journalist reporting on "pornography and adult pleasure products" (says her website), because her narrative voice remains calm and even no matter the subject in the scenes she describes - this book is no "50 Shades of Grey" BS (I haven't read "50 Shades", and I don't feel like I should! :-)). "Permission", already published in 5 languages, will be made into a tv series, and I'm curious how that will turn out, because it seems like a challenging task - and I'm also curious what Vogel will write next, as this is an unusual feminist voice that can be added to an interesting range of emerging writers like Kristen Roupenian and Carmen Maria Machado.

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This book was different than many I had read before. I frequently put it down but always picked it back up later. The book dealt with grief and the BDSM community. This is unlike any book I'd read before and can hang on you a bit. Other than the subject matter it seemed a slow moving book but if you can get into it you're welcomed into seeing Echo's life.

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Unfortunately this was sent as .ascm and not on my kindle, so I couldn´t read it.
Sorry. But thanks so much for approving your title to me.

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This book tells the story of a mercurial young woman who is set adrift by the death of her father, though prior to his passing, there doesn't seem to have been much depth to her life and or personality.
The world of BDSM makes an appearance and the writer goes to great lengths to introduce the reader to the scintillating roles played both submissives and doms. The writing is detailed, descriptive and conveys strong emotion and pleasures, however the cons were that the book has no real storyline; it was difficult to ascertain the climax and the book simply fades away with no real ending.

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Thank to netgalley and the author/publisher for the Arc for my honest review.


An interesting take on the dom/sub storyline and rhe concept of consent. While grief and bdsm don’t always go hand in hand in storylines, it seemed to work fairly well in this case.

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I received an advanced digital copy of this book from Netgalley.com and the publisher.

This book was ok. Unrealistic and over dramatic. It does have an interesting take on the concept of permission and what exactly it means. Overall, not my cup of coffee.

Would not recommend. 2 out of 5 stars.

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An intriguing, honest, raw, and erotic story. What I felt so profoundly was just how much this story, as well written as it is, haunted me so much that I was unable to put it down.
Thank you Netgalley for the eARC.

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A recent episode of Radiolab discussed the connections between the notion of consent and the systems in place to protect participants in the BDSM community. It was clear that, in many cases, proponents of BDSM often have rigid guidelines to ensure consent is established prior to any activity between two people.

It was also unfortunately clear, from firsthand accounts described in the podcast, that these systems can sometimes malfunction. As Saskia Vogel states in her debut novel, Permission,

We might play at power, exploring roles not yet available to us outside these four walls, but for the space to be sacral, it had to be held sacred by us all.

This perceptive reflection from the narrator of the novel has far-reaching implications, certainly beyond the walls of BDSM and even beyond sex itself.

In many ways, it seems as though the understanding and awareness of fantasy and desire on one hand and reconciling our sexuality with the reality of our lives on the other can lead to a more effective system of advocating – and therefore consenting – for ourselves.

Vogel has explained that she turned to literature after her time working as a reporter for a porn industry magazine, suggesting, however, that she continues to explore many of the same questions about discovery, awareness, and acceptance in her current work.

In a lecture about the porn festival, Viva Erotica, Vogel recalls trying to find a way to get audiences to “look at porn as part of, and not separate from, popular culture and the art of cinema.” This project is apparent in Permission. The prose of this novel asks and then demonstrates how the elements of erotica and literary fiction can merge, overlap, intertwine. In many ways, the composition of this novel mirrors life itself.

Reflecting on one’s own sexuality and sexual history in the wake of #MeToo can often be deeply connected to all of the complexities of one’s life and identity. Using the character of Echo, Vogel has the perfect opportunity to explore these connections.

In the novel, Echo is navigating three aspects of her life: a recent family tragedy, complex memories from her adolescence connected to her sexual identity, and the conflicted past and precarious present she has with the entertainment industry. As she confronts each of these facets, she is drawn into the world of her family’s neighbor, Orly, who helps Echo discover herself and reflect on her experiences.

In writing this novel, Vogel has drawn comparisons to Joan Didion. While a comparison to Didion’s writing may be a bit overblown, there is definitely some truth to a thematic link between the two. Like Didion, Vogel locates danger and tragedy in the Californian landscape. There are movie stars and glamorous lifestyles, but there are also jagged cliffs, the impending doom of the San Andreas fault, and disappearances in the Los Angeles canyons. Echo is “forever waiting for tragedy.”

When discussing landscape, the idea of distance is never far off. In Los Angeles, distance is everything. For Echo, the distance between her parents’ home in the canyons and her downtown apartment is vast, though only a car ride away. Even the short distance between neighbors’ homes is prohibitive. It is possible to never meet the person living right next to you.

In Permission, Echo learns that in order to understand herself and cultivate intimacy, she must be willing to eradicate the distance between two bodies, to truly “merge,” as she recalls at one point. In a strikingly surreal sex scene, the physical borders of the body are ripped away; two bodies completely engulf each other.

For a novel that is this brief, there are some odd preoccupations: In one case, Echo repeatedly thinks about the pre-made deli counter food that she eats directly from the containers in her mother’s fridge. Various pre-made salads are given more attention than necessary. The narrator regularly reflects on her mother’s German identity, frequently mentioning her pronunciation of words and desire to move back to “the continent”. While these traits of her mother could provide some valuable insight into the depths of this character, they are not delved into deeply enough for them to be clearly relevant to the story.

In some areas, descriptions venture towards eye-roll territory: “My sheets did not yet smell like sorrow,” or “Alongside my orgasm, sorrow and fear coursed through me.” In general, however, Vogel’s ability to think about the erotic as a legitimate literary technique is encouraging and commendable.

This novel will make a huge impact on the way we consider genre in literature, and it will certainly provide a significant contribution to discussions of sexual identity, desire, acceptance, and consent.

Permission – Saskia Vogel

Coach House Books – Literary Fiction – Release Date: 9 April, 2019

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