Books like The Ages of Lulu

First off, I don´t usually read erotic novels. Years ago I read the Secret Life of Walter and I´ve read bits of Colette and Erica Jong. I came across (er...) this book because I live in Spain and I wanted to read more Spanish writers. Almudena Grandes is famous in Spain as a columnist, novelist and for holding trenchant left-wing views. I´d never heard of the book til I saw it on the shelves but apparently it´s famous and there have been films about it. So I read it.You can´t really dress up the plot of a book where the eponymous protagonist is fifteen when she starts sleeping with her lover, nor that transvestites, incest and threesomes with gay men play a part in the story. So far so scandalous. The sex is deliciously described, in lingering detail, and no holds are barred. If you´re gonna do it, do it right. It´s filthy, all right, so full points there - at least for the first few chapters.What did I like? I liked the open provocation of it - of just going to for it, throwing it all into the reader´s face. I liked the twisting of the usual orthodoxy as regards sex: Lulu loves watching gay men make love - and why not? Men like watching lesbians, right? What didn´t I like? That a book which describes sex so explicitly, yet insists on being a novel, can only be a bore. You know more sex is coming (whoops!) because - well, that´s what this book is about. So you pad through the well-written parts in between the filth knowing what´s going to happen a page or so later. Knowing what´s going to happen next is dull with any book - this is no exception. And even the sex starts to get boring, as wild and perverted as it is. By the end you´re staring at the ceiling and thinking of England while there is a lot of dirty panting and manouvering going on around you.What saves this is Grandes´ writing, which is good, if basic, and especially the setting: the last years of Franco and ´ the movida´, the years right after the dictator´s death when the country, especially Madrid, started a party that would go on for years. This book for me is interesting as a historical piece - as a political artefact. This is a cry against decades of oppression and conservatism. It´s almost teenage in its desire to shock and offend. It´s a microcosm of what people must have felt like then, wanting to break away from that stifling, paternal, righteous, prim society which the right had created under Franco. The fact that publishers and the new "establishment" hold it so sacred suggests everyone wants to rally behind its flag.I live in Spain and everyone has stories about those grim years. Compulsory military service. Policemen on the doors of classrooms in university - doors left open, no long hair, no rock music, no gays, no sex outside marriage, no drugs, no fun! This book is a reaction to that: it´s rubbing those uniformed, smug faces in the fact that their world was over.I get that.