EARLY PLEASURES

EARLY PLEASURES is a fictionalized memoir of a young man coming of age in Bohemia and, later, in Vienna and Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. The backdrop is the end of World War I and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Yet Kohner concentrates with sensitivity and profound insight on the toils of a 15-year-old boy learning the ways of the world, especially where love and sex is concerned. The boy's story is told in four episodes, each episode an encounter with a different woman.

The first, Fraulein Hilde, is a member of the household staff and governess to his younger brother. The second woman, Countess Claudia Kinsky, is a school chum and a self-proclaimed sexual aficionado anxious to play the role of instructor. The collapse of his relationship with Countess Claudia closes the door to one school but opens the door to new adventures in Vienna. The pace of life increases there, bringing with it an episode with an emotionally distraught servant girl and, later, while living in Paris, an intense sexual relationship with a Russian woman.