The Seven Deadly Sins Reading List | Lust

Lust is a wonderfully unreliable narrator. It tells us that a stranger is extraordinary, that an affair is inevitable, that a few stolen hours can outweigh an entire lifetime of good sense.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, lust is merely an excuse to get two people into bed. In the hands of Flaubert, Lawrence or Duras, it becomes a way of exposing the small humiliations, private fantasies and enormous vanities that people spend their lives concealing.

For the fourth entry in our seven deadly sins series, we turn to novels where desire trespasses into forbidden territory, leaving marriages fractured, reputations in tatters and lives irrevocably altered.

Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert

Emma Bovary wants the kind of life that novels have promised her: Grand passions, exquisite suffering, and a lover worth ruining herself for. Marriage to a country doctor offers her neither the passion nor the glamour she has imagined, so she begins looking elsewhere, first for romance, then for excitement, and eventually for the sensation of being someone other than herself. Flaubert is merciless about Emma's delusions, but he is equally attentive to the dreariness of the world that has helped produce them. Her affairs are driven by an appetite for pleasure, certainly, but also by the conviction that somewhere beyond her provincial existence there must be a more extraordinary life waiting for her. Every attempt of hers to reach it leaves her more deeply entangled in the very circumstances she wishes to escape.

The Lover | Marguerite Duras

In the heat of colonial Indochina, a fifteen-year-old French girl begins an affair with a wealthy Chinese man twelve years older. Duras builds the novel around the encounter, but what makes it so unsettling is the way desire becomes entangled with money, race, class, and the girl's complicated relationship with her own family. The affair is both an escape from poverty and a confrontation with the restrictions imposed on her by colonial society. Duras writes about sexuality with a startling mixture of detachment and intensity. The girl knows that her lover desires her, and she understands the power that knowledge gives her, even as she remains vulnerable to the economic and social structures surrounding them.

Damage | Josephine Hart

Stephen Fleming is a respected politician with a family, a career and the sort of carefully ordered existence that suggests a man who has made sensible decisions. Then he meets Anna Barton, his son's fiancée, and becomes consumed by a desire that he knows could destroy everything he has built. Hart wastes little time on the comforting notion that Stephen has simply fallen in love. His attraction is obsessive, secretive and increasingly detached from any concern for the people around him. His desire acquires the authority of an obsession, and everyone in its path becomes vulnerable to its demands. Hart's prose is spare and controlled, which makes the emotional devastation feel all the more severe.

Lady Chatterley's Lover | D. H. Lawrence

Constance Chatterley is married to a wealthy aristocrat whose paralysis has left their marriage physically and emotionally estranged. She begins an affair with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate, whose class position makes him an unlikely partner and whose physical presence awakens something Constance has almost forgotten. Lawrence places physical desire at the centre of the novel. The affair is not simply a rebellion against a loveless marriage. Constance's attraction becomes a way of resurrecting a part of herself that her social position has kept dormant, while Mellors brings his own resentments and class consciousness into their relationship.

A Sport and a Pastime | James Salter

In a small French town, Philip Dean, an American expatriate, begins an affair with Anne-Marie, a young French woman, and their encounters become the central preoccupation of a narrator who reconstructs their intimacy in extraordinary sensual detail. Salter's prose is exacting, attentive to the details of bodies, rooms, light and movement. Yet there is a complication: The narrator's account of Dean and Anne-Marie is filtered through his own imagination, making it difficult to know where observation ends and fantasy begins. The lovers are vivid on the page, but they remain elusive as people, partly because we encounter them through someone who may be more interested in the idea of their affair than in the reality of their lives. This uncertainty gives the novel its peculiar charge. Desire here is not simply the urge to possess another person; it is also the urge to invent them, to turn them into characters in a private drama.

Next sin: Gluttony

Azeema Anhar is an English Language Instructor at ULAB and member of the editorial team at the weekly Counterpoint.