Nobody knows who Chimo really is. As the story goes, the credited author of the slender novel Lila Says sent it to its French publishers in rough form, handwritten on a series of school notebooks. Struck by its quality, and perhaps sore that they missed out on those alien autopsy/Primary Colors brouhahas, they somehow turned it into a European bestseller, marketing it as a Story Of O for the '90s. That the book features as its protagonist a character named Chimo—an impoverished French teenager of North African descent living in the Parisian projects who tells his story by scribbling a series of journal entries into notebooks—only adds to the confusion. The story behind Lila Says is not an easy one to swallow: The book's careful structure seems to be the work of a practiced novelist, even if its rough edges don't. (Issues of translation aside, is the phrase "butt star" really that much more poetic than "asshole"?) But the book itself is what matters, and Chimo, whoever he or she is, has created a deeply uncomfortable novel that's difficult to forget. As it opens, Chimo (the character) finds his life changing because of his friendship with Lila, a beautiful, blonde Catholic schoolgirl who teases him with glimpses of her body while telling explicit stories of her active sex life. Just as vivid as Chimo's erotic descriptions is his depiction of Parisian slum life, its inhabitants, and their sometimes brutal struggles against their lot and each other. It's an essential backdrop for the story, a brutal look at the continued existence of the madonna/whore archetype in the era of AIDS and videotape. A strange tenderness and the narrator's admission of complicity make it more palatable, and powerful, than it might have been otherwise, and the book itself ends up being more interesting than the hype surrounding it. All of which suggests that Chimo, whoever Chimo is, might have known what he (or she) was doing all along.