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by Tony Duvert, Тони Дювер, Valery Nougatov (Translator)

Странные обычаи у жителей деревни, которую описывает Тони Дювер. Время им сообщает часочет, живодер жарит их пухлых детей, писатель сочиняет грязные анонимки, попрыгун лишает девственности женихов, судья предлагает преступления отсидевшим в тюрьме, паромщик подбадривает утопающих, а врач кастрирует бобров. Здесь трудятся подтирщик, теребильщик и птицевод, а ремесло философа достается калеке, живущему в свинарнике.

Во всех своих книгах Дювер увлеченно нападал на буржуазные нормы и социальные институты, топтал брак, семью и церковь, вскрывая темные, животные мотивы тех, кто их поддерживает. Столпы общества, защитники традиционных ценностей хотят лишь одного – сломить вольнолюбие сограждан. В рассказах Дювер предлагает свои выводы с плутовским очарованием. Сочетание весомости и легкомыслия, логика сновидца, модуляции голоса, меняющие смысл фразы, наделяют его истории необычайной силой.

Genres: France, Fiction, Short Stories, French Literature

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Tony Duvert is a French writer born in 1945. Polemist and champion of the rights of the children to have a right to their own body and sexuality, on which he’s published two controversial books of essays, Good Sex Illustrated (1974), L'Enfant au Masculin (1980), though these themes greatly shape his novels. He received the Prix Médicis in 1973 for his novel Paysage du Fantasie (published in America by Grove in 1976 as Strange Landscape). And in 1978, he published with the Éditions Fata Morgana, two works of prose poetry and short texts: District and Les Petits Métiers.

Reviews

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

You examine the walls, ceiling, furniture, feeling the inanity of it all and knowing that you, in fact, are the same. You are no longer made of flesh, are just a heavy, aching mass crushing down on a loose and feeble scaffold of bones.

In his swan song novella, nouveau roman troublemaker Tony Duvert takes the reader on a dark, disorienting tour through a single decrepit district of an unnamed city. Perspective twitches like a hot wire as the lens fixes ever closer on the effluvia, human and otherwise, that chokes the narrow streets and alleys of this urban Petri dish. The ten vignettes contained within channel the roving eyes of the city--the unseen watchers and the desperate dwellers--as they go about their business, be it perverse, banal, or both. A grim and fascinating work.

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like the iconic and cliche saying about peeling an onion and each layer has a separate meaning or taste, so does the work of Tony Duvert. "District" is a 40-page book, with ten sections/chapters and an introduction by the translators S. C. Delaney and Agnès Potier. While reading the book this early afternoon, I immediately thought of the text that went along with the photos of
Eugène Atget, who took early images of Paris and its life before Paris become modernized in the late 19th century. Duvert covers an unnamed city (one can presume it's Paris, but who knows?) and in detail writes about that area in a poetic view or prose. One gets the impression that he's a loner observing life as it happens, but not participating in what goes on in front of him. It's a gem of a small book that leaves a large impression on me. I have always been fascinated with writing that deals with a specific space, such as in various writers who were part of, or influenced by Situationists. Duvert's "District" can follow that direction of such groupings, but also a touch of the "nouveau roman."

[Ben DeCuyper]

This seemed like a good book to hit after Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen since both ascribe beauty to things often considered the costs of urban living. The works’ shared search for beauty in the mundane and grotesque is where the strict similarities end. Paris Spleen was composed between 1855 and 1867. District analyses an unnamed French city during the mid-to-late 1960s. Paris Spleen focuses on people far more than District which favors objects and settings. One of District’s most unsettling lines is given in Window, where an apartment’s belongings are said to have “accumulated for no rhyme or reason, [and] attract little notice.” The person residing in the apartment tries to find motivation as they leave for work and look out the window where “there is nothing outside either.” The sadness is compounded when considered alongside the story Market, in which poor elderly men and women sift through waste finding potential in objects of all kinds. The story ends with them shuffling off, recalling how similar objects were used “back when they had grandkids.” This does bring to mind Baudelaire’s Anywhere Out of the World in which the narrator explains “It always seems to me that I should be happy anywhere but where I am, and this question of moving is one that I am eternally discussing with my soul.” A highlight was Construction Site. I like to think of childhood as the period when children search for spaces unique to their scale, honed for themselves (e.g. nooks and crannies, space under the dinner table, pillow forts, etc.). Imagining children playing in a construction site, or grownups’ space of production, is twisted.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chewy, somewhat dark, slightly surreal, minutely observed. Quintessential Wakefield. What stands out about it are the curiously flipped sensory descriptions.

[Thomas Goddard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ten vignettes. Ten small sketches of a world that feels a little like Borges imagined it.

I can't really say that it has much to offer except this really scrumptious descriptive style.

For example: 'No one's left, the ball of black heat has fallen, every time the sun is red a meteorite falls and one's in darkness, the fire pours from it, a thick fire like motor oil pouring out onto our feet, no, its other bodies roasting and dancing....'

The best way to describe this is like the moment after waking up. Before you've had a chance to rearrange the images from your dreams into a coherent narrative. That jumble. That's Duvert. But really it's reality, just all jostling for attention. Everything is happening at once.

And there's a beautiful grotesque to it... such as with this... 'Down the length of the urinal's outer slabs, along the mossy slate or the zinc, runs a thin rivulet of water that gurgles like a fountain. And softly, the mosses receive both the water and the light.'

But ultimately, egotistically, this is another one that I rate highly because it reads like my own short stories. The same weak grip on the factual. The same alliterative dance over sprawling, incoherent images.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

WINDOW

After several years the white paint on the ceiling is stained (radiators, tobacco). The sad objects that decorate the walls, having accumulated for no rhyme or reason, attract little notice. Being seated, eating, or lying down is all such a drag and a chore, even sleep does nothing to relieve it.

The foor is worn: the comings and goings, the fall of objects, the dust and blots and cleanings. You set down, take away again, attend to clothes not belonging to any-one. Everything in the room conveys your nonexistence.

A home? No, a refuge, a shadowy corner reduced to its tightest dimensions, where you've become like a fish in an aquarium, its glass bowl lined with multicolored gravel, turning around a hundred times per minute.

You get out of bed, chilled to the bone by the morning; naked and hunched, you approach the piece of furniture on which, every day, you deposit the clothes you're to wear. You don't look at them, in too much of a rush to be inside, closed in and warmed, a prisoner.

Shoes laced, tie knotted, spot-washed on any skin left exposed, you set yourself right.

You examine the walls, ceiling, furniture, feeling the inanity of it all and knowing that you, in fact, are the same. You are no longer made of flesh, are just a heavy, aching mass crushing down on a loose and feeble scaffold of bones. About to make a gesture, you refrain from opening the door to leave. You remember having to work eight hours, sleep eight hours, wait eight hours every day. You check the time. You're early, of course. There's time to sit on the edge of the bed, retrieve a pack of cigarettes, ever so slowly smoke one. You think of the actions you'll soon perform when you go down and make your way to work-down below, over there, first the metro, beneath the street, beneath other people, among them. You smoke. Steadily the minute hand turns.

Then, before you leave the room, you glance in the direction of the window. With just a little grief, yet not quite believing what you see, you confirm as you always do that there's nothing outside, either. [11-12]

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were certain lines, and paragraphs even, in this that I really enjoyed. The “Bar” section was by far the most insightful in my opinion. I know that the queasiness this novella produces is purposeful, but given Duvert’s history, it feels as though the author is complicit as well. It feels overly crass, violent, and sexist. The concept is brilliant, and some of the prose is beautiful and vivid. I just couldn’t get the nastiness out of my mind.

[Gayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unusual narrative style. Really enjoyed this worth rereading.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Street scenes as microscopic portraits. Though many of them are peopled, the inhabitants are equal to the objects which make the scene. A fascinating little document.

[meow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like a ghost rising for work and scanning the city’s debris, oulipean listing that dips into the extrasensory, like the psychedelic bar or the formalizing of a nude billboard

[Ereck]

District comes and goes and goes. The translators' introduction is excellent: in step with Duvert and sharply written.