Diario de un inocente

by Tony Duvert

"Diario de las costumbres secretas que han sido siempre, bajo el arsenal de las leyes y de las representaciones colectivas, la levadura de la vida (...). La lengua del Diario alcanza el clasicismo de los grandes modelos (...) ¿Por cuánto tiempo todavía seguirá llamándose perversión a ese grado de lucidez donde la aceptación de la infancia como tal, nuestra intimidad y el deseo del niño, ajeno a nuestro propio deseo, se encuentran y se completan?" René Scherer (Les Nouvelles Littéraires)
"No nos encontramos muy lejos de una literatura de moralista al estilo de otro siglo. Libro sobre la sexualidad evidente, la homosexualidad particularmente, sobre el arte también, sobre la pintura, comparada a la foto porno, sobre la pequeña burguesía, sobre la bestialidad, la moral, las represiones, la educación de los niños, sobre la familia y sobre la ley, sobre los travestis y los heteros, la deformidad física y los totalitarismos, sobre la identidad y la diferencia; sobre los racismos..." Art Press
"Este libro es una especie de autobiografía directa (...) Aquí, más todavía que en sus otros libros y más todavía que en Guyotat o Burroughs, la actividad sexual es un mundo completo que abarca el alma, el cuerpo y el mundo entero, pero con la simplicidad y una banalidad que aumenta su poder de seducción sobre el lector, incluso, y sobre todo, sobre el lector heterosexual (...) Se encontrará en este gran libro, desbordante de riquezas sobrias, elementales, y donde las ganas de amar y de vivir se expresan de una manera tan exacta, el lirismo y la literatura." Antonio Orezza (La Quinzaine Littéraire)
"El diario de esta devoción compone una obra auténtica, por donde pasa, elegante y helada sobre un fondo de alcoba cerrada, la sombra helada de Sade, sin estridencias ni aspavientos (...) La línea divisoria no está entre homosexuales ni heterosexuales, sino más bien entre la humanidad y los hipócritas, entre aquellos que aman el placer y los otros." Bernard Poirot-Delpech (Le Monde)
"Este escritor sexual está en la línea de los grandes clásicos franceses, de Rousseau a Colette, de Fénelon a Proust. Una escritura a la vez gozosa, sensual y moralista (...) No se encontrará en este libro ni sangre ni violencia. Únicamente sexualidad, como podemos constatar hoy en día continuamente, constituye una violencia a nuestras costumbres, a nuestras creencias, a nuestros hábitos de pensamiento. El lector queda pues advertido, el Diario de un inocente de Duvert es un libro de calidad, pero explosivo y, para muchos, realmente intolerable." Madeleine Chapsal (L' Express)
"He aquí un libro deliberadamente pornográfico (...) cuyo principio, como también la filosofía de su autor, se funda en una búsqueda vertiginosa: gozar y seguir gozando. Y esta exasperación de los sentidos culmina algo así como en una oda erótica que nos recuerda a ciertos poemas místicos. Aquí, podría decirse, reinan la calma y la voluptuosidad." Nicole Boulanger (Le Nouvel Observateur)
"Tony Duvert se entrega a una obra agresiva, obsesiva, que le sitúa entre los mejor dotados de nuestros jóvenes escritores (...) El pudor no se encuentra entre las virtudes del autor, que no nos oculta nada de sus fantasías ni de su realización (...) y la escritura seduce por su gracia y por su virtuosidad. Nos recuerda a Jean Genet, pues este Diario de un inocente podría compararse con el Diario de un ladrón. Inútil precisar que no es éste un manjar para todos los paladares." (Lire)

Genres: Fiction, Queer, France, Literature, Gay

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no intention of attempting to tell you what this book is about. I will proceed on the basis that you will, at the very least, have read the GR synopsis but I would recommend reading further about this novel and Tony Duvert if you wish to understand what I am attempting to say.

There are also a number of points that I want to make before reviewing this novel:

1. The publication of this translation was made possible by 'du programme d'aide a la publication benefice du soutien du Ministrie des Affairs Etrangeres et du Service Culturel de l'Ambassade de France represente aux Etates-Unis' which is useful translated as 'the programme of aid for publication...from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States' (please see my footnote *1 below). Can you imagine any UK or USA government department providing financial support for the translation of a work such as this into another language? Of course not but this is a French novel by an important 20th century French novelist and this should not be forgotten.

2. Although not named the country in which the events occur is clearly Morocco and Tony Duvert lived in Morocco in the years immediately preceding the novel's original publication (1976). It would have been difficult if not impossible by that date for Duvert to have lived the life described in Algeria and to a lesser extent Tunisia although the social milieu and cultural attitudes he describes were certainly similar in those North African countries as well. What many English language readers may not immediately pick up on is that Duvert is, while living in his unnamed North African country existing in a Francophone world. At no point does Duvert ever mention needing an interpreter or failing to be understood. Speaking the same language as the boys he develops friendships with provides Duvert with a greater sense of entering into the boys world particularly as the boys are mostly drawn from poor or barely petit bourgeois families.

3. That Duvert lived and wrote about his experiences in Morocco in the mid-to-late 1970s is significant because Duvert was part of gay liberation's first generation which, not only in France but in the UK and USA as well, viewed gay liberation (please see footnote *2 below) as a part of the broader sexual liberation movement which from the mid-to-late 1960s sought to demolish all the sexual shibboleths they saw as integral to the oppressive culture of an older and repressive generation. This is why Duvert's biography of his own experiences growing-up in the 1950s (he was born in 1945) is essential to understanding him and his generation. Having their sexuality denied and repressed as children and adolescents left members of that generation resistant to the idea of banning things. Even as late as 1995 Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt had no qualms including an excerpt from Duvert's novel 'When Jonathan Died' (please see footnote *3 below) in their anthology 'The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing'.

4. Almost every reviewer seems to find it necessary, if they don't condemn this work outright, to emphasize the novel's 'transgressive' nature and how much they were shocked and uncomfortable with the subject matter. I was not shocked or uncomfortable, but not because I am or ever have been a pedophile [pederast is more complicated because until 2000 the age of consent for homosexuals sex was 21 (for heterosexual sex it was 16). So I might claim I am not a pederast but the law might have said different in the past] but because, as I have tried to explain, growing up within a culture that condemned and was intolerant of my sexuality it predisposed me to a more libertarian viewpoint. As for 'Diary of an Innocent' being a transgressive novel? I regard the transgressive label as a marketing term not a literary one. For me it is a back door way of reintroducing the idea of a moral or immoral novel which, for me, was demolished when Wilde said:

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written...That is what fiction means."

That doesn't mean I find nothing offensive. I find the use/abuse of the powerful over the weak as entertainment deeply problematic. Even though I realise that most S&M and BDSM is nothing more then theatrics I still find the enjoyment of abuse for pleasure, even within imaginary context, disturbing, though I don't believe it should be banned.

It has taken me a long time to get here, and I will refer to things I have already discussed, but here finally is

MY REVIEW:

It is not often that a great writer in one language is translated by someone of equal stature in another. Bruce Benderson has turned Duvert's literary French into great literary English. I don't think you could ask for a finer or more sensitively attuned translator for Duvert than Bruce Benderson (Benderson won the prestigious Prix de Flore for his 2003 novel 'The Romanian' which he wrote in French and published first in France as 'Autobiographie érotique'. Benderson's introduction to 'Diary of an Innocent' is also superb and essential reading and he touches on one of the essential 'unknowns' about Duvert. Despite his prominent notoriety as a writer of pedophile and pederast novels no one can say that he actually did what he described in his novels. Now while I can accept that novels like 'When Jonathan Died' may not describe actual experiences I find it much harder to accept that with 'Diary of Innocent'. Benderson is unlike, indeed is the opposite of, writers like Burroughs and most of the Beats who remained completely detached from the foreign cultures they lived amongst (even in Paris Burroughs and the other Beats moved exclusively amongst expatriate Americans and a few English. None of them spoke French, or had an interest in French people, culture, etc. This is even more true of the time Burroughs and other 'Beats' spent in North Africa). But Duvert lived with and amongst the boys and their families he writes about. He was in no way a typical sexual tourist either of his own times, or past times or current ones. He was not Joe Orton on holiday.

That Duvert is not simply a Western sexual predator exploiting poorer brown boys can be confirmed by the fact Abdellah Taia, the great Moroccan writer, was happy to give help and support to Bruce Benderson in his translation efforts. That doesn't mean that Duvert's position vis a vis the boys he befriends and has sex with isn't complicated and problematic. Although Duvert is an acute, careful and honest observer of the life in poor Moroccan families and communities and tries to describe the variegated and complicatedly nuanced sexual habits, prejudices and taboos of the boys he cannot escape that the world he is living and describes in Morocco has been formed and perverted by its years as a French colony during which it was notorious as a place where boys are easily, and cheaply, available for Westerners.

Duvert did not have the money to be one of the tourist 'Lord Bountifuls' raining largesse not only on a boy but on his family as well, but he was part of the same system. His means may have been modest but the poverty he lived amongst was very real unlike anything he would have seen or experienced in France. Almost all the children are barefoot and usually hungry and his mundane items like soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes and above all cologne had an incredible and almost mesmeric allure to the boys he knew. Visiting in the early 1970s Duvert, like many Westerners who tried to live amongst other, much poorer, peoples and communities (the myth of the anthropologist as an observer who doesn't interfere), didn't realise that there was no way he could not affect those he moved amongst.

But this is no ode to boys, it is not travelogue, memoir, or rationalisation of boy love, though it contains elements of all these. His thoughts are always tuned towards metropolitan France - a world that had rejected him because of his homosexuality and which he loathed but was not searching for a replacement of. In the boys he knows in Morocco he sees a freedom he didn't have and which he views as better than what French boys experienced (there would be no problem making the case for Duvert as a misogynist. Whether he really was one I am not so sure). A great deal of what he writes about the life of the boys in his unnamed North African country is really a paean to the life of the poor on the streets. Although he does not exactly romanticise it he is blind to how hard, unforgiving and cruel the world of the poor is. Duvert is always somewhat disengaged, he didn't live in this world full time and clearly he never thought of it as anything but a temporary home.

What Duvert doesn't say, or maybe see, is that the world he describes is changing. It is no more permanent than the teeming slums and street-life of 19th century Paris or London in the works of Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens (though it must have been even grimmer, if as common, to be a barefoot child year round in London or Paris). The world Duvert describes is not an alternative to Western ways, but a left over from an earlier era. No matter how little any North African government cared about its poor boys or allowed them to be abused by beatings and buggery by police and employers, the governments acquiescence with the boys (and others) providing sex for Westerners was on the cusp of removal. Slow but regularly increasing prosperity was transferring these countries. It is significant that Duvert never went back. As the 1980s rolled on Duvert saw gay liberation achieve acceptance but at the price of real systemic change. He also got older.

I don't know how aging affected Duvert but if he had pedophile/pederastic feelings then they may have become increasingly problematic as he moved from being the older brother/friend to parental figure (in Diary of Innocent the narrator is 29 still young enough within the early marriages and large families of Morocco to be an older brother/friend to the boys he had sex with). I think getting older combined with the collapse of his literary fame may have combined to make him into the recluse he became.

I realise that I have mostly said, if not negative, then contrary things about this novel but I must emphasise that if it doesn't matter that the courting rituals of Jane Austen have disappeared then it doesn't matter if the rituals Duvert describes in Diary of Innocent are long gone. What he writes is true and honest and maybe that is why so many people find it shocking or problematic. I find it more shocking that the same people will visit Morocco and buy souvenirs from sweatshops were boys the ages that Duvert describes having sex with still work long, long hours for miserably wages.

There is a very good reason for official French institutions to see work like this disseminated in other languages - it is a work of profundity and beauty. Duvert is not a propagandist for sex with boys but for freedom and honest and search for what really matters.

*1 This French government support for the translation of previously untranslated works by Tony Duvert is a possible explanation of why Semiotext(E) has not republished his previously translated (and almost impossible to acquire) novels 'When Jonathan Died' and 'Strange Landscape'.
*2 I am using the term 'gay' liberation in the crude way it was understood at the time, gay meant people of the same sex (gender wasn't even considered) having sex (bisexuality was regarded with deep suspicion and hostility as a refusal to accept ones essential nature). It was only with the gradual acceptance of the basic tenets of 'gay' liberation, along with the emergence of the first post gay liberation generation, that moves were made to separate from and reject organisations like NAMBLA (this review is long enough - look it up - its' worth it).
*3 the only English language version of Duvert's 'Quand mourant Jonathan' (1978), When Jonathan Died' was published by the UK's Gay Men's Press in 1991, the GMP actually commissioned this translation. It is impossible to imagine GMP today commissioning a translation of and publishing (aside from the fact there are no longer any Gay publishers) such a work (copies of the GMP edition, when you can find them, sell for sums of £100+ in the UK). Of course 'When Jonathan Died' and the more expensive 'Strange Landscape' (probably c. £200) are available on Internet Archive but I have never enjoyed reading books via it, splendid resource though it may be.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard the name Tony Duvert on Dennis Cooper's great (and on going) blog, and was intrigued that he was a French writer (my obsession) and wrote about sexuality that many will feel questionable. "Diary of an Innocent" reads like a sex diary, rant, social theory, and a feverish dream all at once. The back cover liner notes says 'novel' but I wonder if it is - but that's not the issue of the book. What the book is about is a man who enjoys gay sex with various young boys in what may be somewhere in North Africa. It is also a social critique on the nature of passion and how it plays itself out in the 'mainstream' world.

Towards the end of the book he writes about heterosexuality as an outlaw fringe group lurking in the shadows of homosexual world that is both funny and quite insightful in how structure rules the world. In another one of his books (which I haven't read) "Good Sex Illustrated" he attacks the fact that a child's sex is conditioned and controlled by the structure of family and state - and are taught not to for fulfil their sexuality or desires. So through the eyes of Duvert, Western sexuality is part of a system that these kids are pooped out to fill out a role that family, state, and whoever wants to control.

"Diary of an Innocent" is a complex and very frank book about sexuality and how that plays out in a very constructed culture and society

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5, rounded up.

I really should have just DNF'd this before the halfway point, as - although the prose (even in translation) is admirable- there is nothing even remotely resembling a plot and the repetitiousness and meandering philosophical pensées eventually grated over a VERY long 256 pages. I persevered as I wanted to use this to fulfill a 'Read Harder' Challenge of a postcolonial book, which I think it counts as ...

It's basically just the musings of the jaded young (29-year-old) author and his sexual encounters with young, often prepubescent, boys in what - although not explicitly stated - is undoubtedly Morocco. I'm sure it was shocking back in 1976 and still has the ability to provoke some strong negative emotions, but again, one becomes desensitized to it all due to being bludgeoned with the same tropes over and over and over.

[Samir · Rating 5 out of 5]

Through elemental and exquisetly constructed prose Duvert led me on a renewed discovery of the underbelly of our western cultures, particularly our capacities and habbits of interpersonal relations.

Duvert at once pulls the reader in and instigates a removal within where the reader is allowed the space to critique what is presented. Duvert accomplishes this through several devices, including telling stories of his subjects where he interchanges refereneces to them between the intimate personal pronoun and a more distant descriptive.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Happened to pick this up during Borders going out of business sale. This book is troubling, memorable, poetic, brutally frank, and outright shocking.
Diary of an Innocent recounts the risky experiences of a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in an imaginary setting that suggests North Africa. A cascading series of portraits of the narrator's adolescent sexual partners and their culture that ends with a fanciful yet rigorous construction of a reverse world in which marginal sexualities have become the norm.

[Zack2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Duvert makes an excellent Rousseauist and sexual obsessive, writes with immaculate style, and when it comes to it, is a cutting polemicist. After reading this and District, he has shot up to being one of my favorite writers.

I can't say I share the narrator's predilection, but so much of the book shines through that I have to give it 5 stars. (Also, it's not nearly as edgy as the blurb makes it sound. It's quite a sweet book.)

[Hermes · Rating 3 out of 5]

“a sexual retard” (p. 195).

[Miguel Blanco Herreros · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cuando afronté la lectura de la obra de Tony Duvert lo hice con total conciencia de a qué me enfrentaba. Sabía cuál era la temática del libro. Sabía la biografía y el pensamiento del autor. Era consciente de las críticas y alabanzas que había recibido su escritura, y la evolución que había sufrido la percepción general hacia ella. Lo sabía todo.

Pero no.

Si la pregunta es si Duvert tenía talento, si era un buen escritor, la respuesta es sí: tenía mucho talento. Si su mente no hubiera estado tan emponzoñada y podrida, seguramente podría haber logrado mucho con ese don, pero supongo que no podía escapar de su propia naturaleza.

Y es que “Diario de un inocente” es uno de los pocos casos —casi me atrevo a decir que el único que recuerde— de obra literaria cuya innegable calidad técnica y estilística no pueden nada contra la oscuridad de la mente de su creador. Al menos de las que yo haya leído. El problema no es el libro, o su temática, o su forma. Es Duvert. Y no lo digo sólo porque fuese un (detalladamente) declarado pederasta, sino porque todo él esta podrido, es defectuoso. Y además desde una perspectiva totalmente edulcorada y ligera. Tony Duvert era un ser tan oscuro, calculador y degradado que el hecho de que abuse de niños es casi lo que menos me sorprende, y es completamente indulgente con su propia indignidad como humano.

No soy ningún mojigato, y menos cuando hablamos de literatura. He leído de todo, y me gusta el morbo de tentar textos arriesgados, que te desafíen no sólo desde el punto de vista lector, sino también moral e intelectual. Pero el problema es que este autor no aporta nada a la literatura. Es un ser desechable y que sobra en la sociedad —la misma que él desprecia—, volcando su frustración, su pérfida ideología y sus crímenes en el papel, aprovechándose de un inmerecido talento. Duvert no es Sade, ni Céline, ni Burroughs, ni Matzneff, ni tantos y tantos escritores que eran despreciables e inmorales de alguna (o algunas) maneras. Duvert emponzoña con su espíritu el alma de su escritura hasta hacerla irrecuperable.

Me sorprende enormemente la cantidad de buenas valoraciones que tiene este libro. O quizás no, qué triste. Quizás por eso son tan necesarios libros como "El consentimiento" o "La familia grande".

Esta es la primera, y espero que última vez, que tengo que valorar un libro obviando su calidad técnica o estética. Mucho me temo que “Diario de un inocente” está contaminado, y si algún autor debe ser sacrificado al olvido de los tiempos, Duvert me parece una gran opción.

[Sergi Nos García · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cuando lo empecé a leer me vino a la mente una serie de palabras... "Grotesco, Inapropiado, Indefendible, Directo..."

En un afán por intentar empatizar con el escritor (recordemos que es un diario) siento inútilmente como rechazo ciertos actos y condeno algunos otros, es innegable que es un buen libro, pero es duro, tienes que estar preparado para leerlo, haber sufrido ciertas etapas en tu vida para poder llegar a comprender mínimamente al autor, como dije, sin éxito o con cierto fastidio, a penas llevo dos tercios del mismo y debo admitir que me está costando terminarlo, no por que sea pesado, sino por que te hace reflexionar o poner en perspectiva cosas que nunca te hubieras imaginado, me recuerda un poco a "Diario de un ladrón" de Genet.

Dentro de sus experiencias, dudas, límites éticos, hay cierto atisbo de melancolia, intentada ocultar por el propio autor, una vida completamente reprochable, por una sociedad que, aún a dia de hoy tiene el cliché de la "libertad sexual" poco extendido y se trata, como un tabú temas como la educación sexual en menores...

En definitiva, si algún día te haces con ejemplar del mismo, léelo con cautela, no de golpe, analiza cada frase, cada palabra... Aguanta, intenta empatizar, procura forzar, es un libro entretenido, pero no está escrito como entretenimiento sino como conciencia, una conciencia que nunca ha tenido el visto bueno, con motivo, seguramente, o no...

[J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Bruce Benderson points out in his fantastic introduction to this novel, as an American reader, I was disturbed by the narrator's lack of redemption at the end.
But more disturbing was that the bulk of this book is truly boring. Describing page after page of a man graphically describing sex with underage boys as "boring" is certainly not going to win me any allies, but it's the truth. How many different ways can an author describe bodies and their positioning before the reader says, "Ok; got it"?
The book only really redeems itself in the last 50 pages, where the narrator begins to wax philosophical. The section on the reversal, by which I mean how homosexuals would treat heterosexuals if the world's prejudices were reversed, is especially interesting. The final relationship, i.e. the narrator's relationship with the "innocent" of the title is heart wrenching, especially given how other boys who deserve far less have been given so much more by him.
An interesting book in the history of transgressive works, but with none of the panache of Lolita or Burroughs' works.

[Joe Salas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the cover of this book, the photograph is so pretty. Weirdly I think it is a photograph of some shacks in a Latin American city (Havana?), even though the events in the book seem to take place in Morocco or Algeria or something?

[joe]

I understand that there’s a certain pay off towards the end of this book, and some philosophical points are poignantly touched upon, but it felt like a slog for me for those 200 or so pages before that. Started off feeling energetic and exciting, only to then feel like I was trapped in the mind of the author as they indulged themselves in their own writing and ideas. Don’t mind some indulgence and witnessing an author sink into spirals of sentences, but things because sluggish, overly repetitive, and from page 120 onwards it left me feeling quite cold.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

'I wanted to talk about birds, but the time for that has passed.'

Een lastig boek om te lezen (en beoordelen), vanwege het onderwerp, dat ook het schrijven van Duvert gedeeltelijk overschaduwd; dit is dan ook waar de (werkelijke) transgressie ontstaat.

*3,5

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad read considering the subject as the author fully admits he is a boy lover and was very open and honest in his account Fair to say some readers would be up in arms in relation to his story but end of the day there is after all two sides to everything in life so I would say this was a interesting book with a sort of subject of curiosity

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange. Extremely disjointed and highly unlikely. One of the intros suggests that this book is intended to be satire. It doesn't read like satire. It reads like the author describing multiple sexual encounters with underage boys. And I don't mean just underage in the USA. Boys as young as 8 or 9.
Not my cup of tea.