Odd Jobs
By Tony Duvert
1978
First Published
4.05
Average Rating
72
Number of Pages
This series of twenty-three satirically scabrous short texts introduces the reader to an imaginary French suburb via the strange, grotesque small-town occupations that defined a once reliable, now presumably vanished way of life. A catalog of job descriptions that range from the disgusting functions of “The Snot-Remover” and “The Wiper” to the shockingly cruel dramas enacted by “The Skinner” and “The Snowman,” Odd Jobs offers an outrageous, uncomfortable, and savage sense of humor. Through these narratives somewhere between parody and prose poem, Tony Duvert assaults parenthood, priesthood, and neighborhood in this mock handbook to suburban living: a Sadean Leave it to Beaver as written by William Burroughs.
Avg Rating
4.05
Number of Ratings
84
5 STARS
35%
4 STARS
42%
3 STARS
18%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads
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.
