Not that The Savage Detectives precisely anticipates my possible (but still withheld) objections, but it does at least suggest, quickly, another way of looking at them:

[Angélica says,] "What do you think of the pictures?"

"Hard-core," I said.

"Hard-core? That's all?" San Epifanio got up and sat in the wooden chair where I had been. From there he watched me with one of his knife-blade smiles.

"Well, there's a kind of poetry to them. But if I told you that they only struck me as being poetic, I'd be lying. They're strange pictures. I'd call them pornographic. Not in a negative sense, but definitely pornographic."

"Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. "Did the pictures turn you on?"

"No," I said emphatically, although the truth is I wasn't sure. "They didn't turn me on, but they didn't disgust me either."

"Then it isn't pornography. Not for you, at least."

"But I liked them," I admitted.

"Then just say that you liked them and you don't know why you liked them, which doesn't matter much anyway, period."

Sure, it's a way of looking at things that renders blogging and reviewing and most academic discussion of literature functionally inert. But it's got truth going for it, which is something.

At least it doesn't prevent us from pointing at the things we like. Speaking of figurative language, here's the loveliest bit of introduction to some literary sex I've read lately:

Why I don't know, maybe because I was so nervous, but I said I wasn't sleepy. I know, said María, me neither. Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.