While I was heading to Santiago de Compostela, waiting at the Bergamo Orio al Serio airport for the Ryanair flight I got caught by the dark front page and title of a book, which, I found out later, has become a cult and worldwide bestseller of the summer: Fifty shades of Grey.
“The second and third volumes of the trilogy are titled Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, respectively. Fifty Shades of Grey has topped best-seller lists around the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States. The series has sold 40 million copies worldwide.
The Fifty Shades trilogy was developed from a Twilight fan fiction originally titled Master of the Universe and published episodically on fan-fiction websites under the pen name “Snowqueen’s Icedragon”. After comments concerning the sexual nature of the material, the author, E. L. James, rewrote Master of the Universe as an original piece, with the principal characters renamed Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele and removed it from her website prior to publication.” (Source: Wikipedia)

At the book store…

My eyes point immediatly at the front page of the second chapter of the trilogy: Fifty shades darker (Cinquanta sfumature di nero, in Italian), featuring a venetian like mask on a dark background..(see below)
As you all know, dark and black are my passion…
Why not, I think, for two and a half hours of boring flight, I can give it a try, but better to start from the first book to follow better the story… dark front page with a grey tie image, not bad as well…
So here I am, after years of just online reading, I buy my first paper book again. At around 14 Euros, Italian version, at the expensive airport book store.

On the plane…

As the nice front page opens and I start reading… I detect immediatly that the audience will be equally shared between the ones that will love this book and the ones, like me, which will stop reading it after few pages.

Why?

At a first look the plot may seem intriguing: a young inexperienced and naive college girl meets a beautiful, young, business magnate with a taste for dominance and submission games, a control freak.

All things most of us have already dreamt about, all things some of us have already experienced, with just the little difference that we are not that naive, not that inexperienced, not so young and bad dressed like her, and we like to see our creative immagination fulfilled as we desire and deserve. So, lack of identification at first, for me. She is too young, not really going to enjoy the tones of experience that she will gain (thanks to Mr Grey), she is not enough imperative. Anastasia thinks and talks like a typical “double morale obsessed” girl making things bigger than what they really are and interpreting them with a typical unenlightened view. In short: she is too mainstream. A good reason for me not to identify with her, a good reason, on the contrary, for many to identify with her and buy the book.
For me, it’s simple: the fact we share similar (but not equal) dreams doesn´t make us the same, not our choices the same.

Let´s go on…

what about Him?
Mr Grey (the soon to be Master)… He is beautiful, pretty young (in his thirties), incredibly rich and successful, yet a little bit weired in his sexual preferences.
A dream of a guy, for many girls, partly for me as well… and that´s the point… too much unreal and too young for my taste. I like ways more experienced kind of guys, ways older than me, I do not care of young and beautiful skin, on the contrary I enjoy to see signs of experience on their faces…
Mr Grey is not the Darken Rahl of Terry Goodkind´s “The Sword of Truth” saga, a real powerful, eager, ruthless, experienced Master of the evil able to make, for real, good girls go bad.
He is not Darth Vader as well (Darth has been my first great crush since I was a child). Darth, the true “Switch” for excellence, so powerful yet slave. Beautiful and young, half machine and old, I don´t care… I will always love him. No matter how he looks like… and his metallic breath drives me completely crazy. He IS contradiction. He simply IS DARTH.
Mr Grey IS not, He is a Mr GREY indeed, not more, not less. Not my kind of guy. He could be, but he is not. Sorry–I like it darker than grey…

Going on…

For now we have two typical mainstream characters and a promise of a “sexual and sadomasochistic initiation” for the virgin protagonist… mostly sexual–I would say–which means automatically boring. I already smell in the air that the BDSM session will be reduced to a normal belt spanking with her getting shocked for sure, and nothing really intriguing… She is not the beauty imprisoned in the castle from the dark prince… Forget about that. (If you wish to read somenthing like that I suggest to you “The sleeping beauty” written by Anne Rice, way more inspiring or the “Story of O“, gets straight to the point)

Still reading…

I am a bit pissed off… The reading is getting harder yet I go on jumping some pages… and get to a part that I hope will eventually catch my attention… THE CONTRACT
So.. as the World has begun, formal contracts in D/s relationships became a basic rule (except the many examples of war slavery and the Inquisition, of course), most of the time overridden, yet pretty fascinating as kind of game. But of course, it depends on what kind of contract we are talking about…

Ok, here I stop….

I start reading… yes, ok usual stuff.. he is going to do what he wants out of her…I go on……Con.. consensuality?? NO, NO, NO please NO. A safe sane and consensual D/s contract in a fictional book? This is too much. I close the book and stop reading, forever and ever. Please give me back the Darken Rahl which forces young sweet good girls to become terrible Mordsits and Mistresses through the hard way of true pain, survival instinct, and parental homicide, give me back the kidnapped princess enslaved from the bad, yet fascinating, sultan of the eastern lands. Give me back the Gorean way and the fight between forced enslavement and freedom. Give me back what I want to find in a book: my wildest dreams, my imagination, all my little secrets, all what I find hard to confess.

“Fifty” good reasons, at least for me, to stop reading it: too mainstream, to vanilla, too sexual and not enough pain and tears, lack of charm and sensuality. Too much “Twilight” (even tough I enjoy sometimes to the twilight movie, reading it is too much), as it was indeed originally intentionally inspired.

“Fifty” good reasons, on the contrary, why it has become a best-seller and is worth reading if you are seeking for safer and more conventional ways of facing your dark dreams… The book itself is well written (even tough I have seen just the Italian version, I think the original one, in English is even better) and has the right charm if you are yet unused to D/s thematics but wish to get slowly acquainted with.