Tony Duvert
Tony Duvert (1945–2008) is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction. His fifth novel, Paysage de fantaisie (Strange Landscape), won the prestigious Prix Médicis in 1973. Other books translated into English include the novel When Jonathan Died, and the scathing critique of sex and society Good Sex Illustrated (Semiotext(e), 2007).
Good Sex Illustrated
Tony Duvert
Translated by Bruce Benderson
First published in France in 1973, Good Sex Illustrated gleefully deciphers the subtext of a popular sex education manual for children produced during that period. In so doing, Duvert mounts a scabrous and scathing critique of how deftly the “sex-positive” ethos was harnessed to promote the ideal of the nuclear family. Like Michel Houllebecq, Duvert is highly attuned to all the hypocrisies of late twentieth century western “sexual liberation” mass movements. As Bruce Benderson notes in his introduction, Good Sex Illustrated shows that, “in our sexual order, orgasm follows the patterns of any other kind of capital … ‘good sex’ is a voracious profit machine.”
Diary of an Innocent
Tony Duvert
Translated by Bruce Benderson
Introduction by Bruce Benderson
Now for the first time, Duvert’s most highly crafted novel is available in English. 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. More reverie than narrative, Duvert’s Diary presents a cascading series of portraits of the narrator’s adolescent sexual partners and their culture, and ends with a fanciful yet rigorous construction of a reverse world in which marginal sexualities have become the norm.
The Undiscoverable Reading
…the subversive novel is art consumed by the class that benefits materially, socially and sexually from the order of the realm it attacks. It is a hyper culture that is often above the intellectual resources of the bour- geoisie, and that is shared particularly by a professional elite dedicated to the “cultural” and to rebellion. Liberated speech, whether or not it can actually initiate liberty, is feed for a henhouse with solid wire fencing.