District
By Tony Duvert
1978
First Published
3.64
Average Rating
62
Number of Pages
District describes, in ten vignettes, the sad, sordid, and sinister aspects to a section of an unnamed French city, and the manners in which the ghost-like human entities that inhabit, 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 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 past 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.
Avg Rating
3.64
Number of Ratings
88
5 STARS
17%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
5%
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Author
Tony Duvert
Author · 7 books
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.
