District

By Tony Duvert

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 193966330X
• ISBN13: 9781939663306
• Release Date: November 2017
• Publisher: Wakefield Press
• Length: 56 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 4.4" x 6.8"