An outcast's tour of city life'from construction site to metro, from bar to brothel
THE AUTHOR: a cult favorite among American transgressive novelists such as Dennis Cooper, and championed by Roland Barthes, Tony Duvert ( 1945-2008) was the enfant terrible of 60s-70s French literature. Through Barthes, he achieved public recognition in 1973 with his novel Strange Landscape. Semiotexte has recently reintroduced him into English. He was extremely controversial because of his advocacy of pedophilia. Could be compared to Michel Houllebecq or Dennis Cooper
THE BOOK 10 vignettes of the sad, sordid, and sinister aspects to a section of an unnamed French city. One of Duvert's last books, never before translated into English.
By Tony Duvert. Introduction by S.C. Delaney. Translation by S.C. Delaney, Agnès Potier.
District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid and sinister aspects of a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghostlike human entities that live and wither within it are molded, moved and absorbed by its spaces.
A noisy metro station, old tenements, buildings going up, along with the fixtures of French communal life: the open-air market, the public garden; the little shops and bars, the lively town square—the ugly and mundane, the coarse and unmentionable sit side by side with the occasionally burgeoning bit of beauty. With a sense of voyeuristic tension and queasy complicity, the reader is taken on an outcast’s tour of city life—from construction site to metro, from bar to brothel—an analysis of communal living in the conditional tense from the perspective of the absolute exile. One of Duvert’s last books, it is also one of his shortest: an unexpected return to the roving, fractured eye of the Nouveau Roman that had informed his earliest work.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Full Stop
Aaron Winslow
Now, with the publication of Odd Jobs and District — both beautifully translated and introduced by S.C. Delaney and Agnes Potier — readers have access to a fuller range of Duvert’s later oeuvre, quieter but no less provocative. These slim (approximately 40 pages each) volumes are put out by the venerable Wakefield Press, whose publication of translations of “overlooked gems and literary oddities” is nothing short of the Lord’s work.
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FORMAT: Pbk, 4.5 x 7 in. / 56 pgs. LIST PRICE: U.S. $11.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $17.5 GBP £9.99 ISBN: 9781939663306 PUBLISHER: Wakefield Press AVAILABLE: 11/21/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Wakefield Press. By Tony Duvert. Introduction by S.C. Delaney. Translation by S.C. Delaney, Agnès Potier.
District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid and sinister aspects of a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghostlike human entities that live and wither within it are molded, moved and absorbed by its spaces.
A noisy metro station, old tenements, buildings going up, along with the fixtures of French communal life: the open-air market, the public garden; the little shops and bars, the lively town square—the ugly and mundane, the coarse and unmentionable sit side by side with the occasionally burgeoning bit of beauty. With a sense of voyeuristic tension and queasy complicity, the reader is taken on an outcast’s tour of city life—from construction site to metro, from bar to brothel—an analysis of communal living in the conditional tense from the perspective of the absolute exile. One of Duvert’s last books, it is also one of his shortest: an unexpected return to the roving, fractured eye of the Nouveau Roman that had informed his earliest work.
