District by Tony Duvert (translated by S.C. Delaney and Agnès Potier).
Title: District.
Author: Tony Duvert (translated by S.C. Delaney and Agnès Potier).
Genre: Literature, fiction, vignettes.
Country: France.
Language: French.
Publication Date: 1978.
Summary: This novel of ten vignettes describes the sad, sordid, and sinister aspects to a section of an unnamed French city sometime in the 1960s, 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 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.
My rating: 7/10.
My review:
♥ In time you'd grow used to it. You'd approach the buildings. Pass your hands, your fingernails over them, leaving behind, perhaps, a little blood. Blood that's dirty, that's white. The kind that eats away at doors, glass, faux wood, plastic, steel; you'd enter, you'd leave, you'd touch. You'd leave behind a trace of sweat.
♥ By then the laughter had stopped. It was time to wait for daylight.
Daylight would come. Some children would yell. Others cry. Still others laugh. They had the same voice-the one shared by children.
Their noise would be heard.
And the women would shout. Voices that never cried, never laughed, the voices of mothers. Hard, shrill, loud, these women in overcoats that were black, navy blue, anus brown, voices with wrinkles in them, eyelashes in the wrinkles, proper black outlines for stamping out that anus-brown gaze, slack openings out of which came sounds, looks, liquids.
The pipes were now buried. Trenches cut into the ground, the earth muddy, orange, oozy, gleaming in little piles on the edge of the trench. The pipes carried gas or water, there where people talked, where the women were limp and thin as rails, where the children ran.
Quiet all around, no sounds, motorbikes, trains, planes, pneumatic drills, bicycles, mothers, doors, cars-nothing at all could be heard.
But then, right off the merchants would call, the stores gape open, be invaded and emptied out. Returning with your spoils you'd walk in the mud, happy, the streets like highway interchanges with the buyers, dressed in coats, traveling up and down their lengths, here one holding a dog by a leash, gripping a child or a purse. It was the mothers, their hands full as they returned.
~~Construction Site.
♥ A figure is watching the window. He's not yet old but wears black. Fall has arrived, a fall that's sudden, pale, too mild, unsettling. The man is old since the children don't look at him.
Inside the bookstore, the saleslady passes out candies, licorice, sugary things that smell like snow, snow doesn't fall, in autumn it's leaves. The little coins between the children's fingers can't be seen.
He tells himself that he'd like selling things to children. They're everywhere, as the school just let out next door. After leaving the school they go by the store, buy some ammo, read the prices on the machine guns, the bears, the daggers.
..He looks at the children's faces, in which he recognizes their parents' decrepitude, sees old faces overlay the children's, wrinkles, lines, the brutish old age of fathers and mothers imprints itself on their white flesh. He doesn't like children, he knows what they are, has nothing to say to them, nothing to say about them; he hates them.
The dirty little mugs of adults in miniature, dirty little vices, dirty little foolishness, meanness, cowardice of adults in miniature. But they move. The adults walk slowly, work, suffer, torture, sleep, all slowly; the adults die, the children move. Elephants are slow, flies quick, thinks the man; it makes him laugh. In front of the window, he thinks to himself that he likes flies, listening and hearing them around him like tiny puppies prancing about.
The children shine in the light from the windows. He likes this light. He smiles, it grows dark, the street is empty, the children full of fear, he likes this fear.
~~Figure.
♥ The floor is worn: the comings and goings, the fall of objects, the dust and blots and cleanings. You set down, take away again, attend to clothes not belonging to anyone. Everything in the room conveys your nonexistence. A home? No, a refuge, a shadowy corner reduced to its tightest dimensions, where you've become like a fish in an aquarium, its glass bowl lined with multicolored gravel, turning around a hundred times per minute.
You get out of bed, chilled to the bone by the morning; naked and hunched, you approach the piece of furniture on which, every day, you deposit the clothes you're to wear. You don't look at them, in too much of a rush to be inside, closed in and warmed, a prisoner.
..You examine the walls, ceiling, furniture, feeling the inanity of it all and knowing that you, in fact, are the same. You are no longer made of flesh, are just a heavy, aching mass crushing down on a loose and feeble scaffold of bones. About to make a gesture, you refrain from opening the door to leave. You remember having to work eight hours, sleep eight hours, wait eight hours every day. You check the time. You're early, of course. There's time to sit on the edge of the bed, retrieve a pack of cigarettes, ever so slowly smoke one. You think of the actions you'll soon perform when you go down and make your way to work-down below, over there, first the metro, beneath the street, beneath other people, among them. You smoke. Steadily the minute hand turns.
Then, before you leave the room, you glance in the direction of the window. With just a little grief, yet not quite believing what you see, you confirm as you always do that there's nothing outside, either.
~~Window.
♥ Migraine. The head gone, migraine within its space. A wheel in place of a head, face swallowed in, head beneath heels that walk, scuff, roam, trail one another in sequence. Periodic blasts, whispered dances, sounds of guillotine, squeals that make each tip of the vertebra ring.
Men's gazes slide down women's legs-solely to feed the lonely vice of the metro, now vibrating.
Down in the trench, at its center, are rails-two pairs, parallel and opposing. Your head grinding under these wheels that, from well overhead, bodies weigh down.
♥ Straightaway they're startled by a cry that makes them shudder. A blackish mass, pyramid-shaped, sunken (a pyramid in which the base inhales the top, its summit resisting and rising upward, then sinking down again, neck's sinews strained and bared beneath the skin, which like a lizard's stomach is wrinkled and lined with rhomboid crosshatching, upon which time's grit is deposited, damp with secretions), tarry matter heaped against a wall but pushed, by the archway's bend, toward the hallway's center. And it lets fly a wail that resembles a song, its eyes closed as the sound rushes out. It's an old woman that utters this cry, while, now and again in its vicinity, a coin drops and lands on the ground.
♥ The billboards are giant concave sheets across which run our words. The shifting blots create a fixed illustration (it would depict a whore having had her ovaries removed, or an eggshell just when a spoon penetrates-an image that's fully experienced). Our glances take the form of a spoon that rings, with creeping slowness, within the great effulgence of the billboards.
~~Metro.
♥ So many stories. In the traces of whiskey, one must search.
~~The Bar.
♥ And suddenly, straight ahead, the street's deserted.
Absolute silence. Iron shutters cover store windows, wooden shutters cover the windows of homes. And the seedy houses have that whiff about them of the slap, the wine, the rain, the foul moods.
♥ On certain lots, low shelters made of asphalt-coated tarp, of cardboard and string, hidden by elder trees, homes of windows in chasubles, sheds of gardeners, of tramps who died today, where you go inside and remove all your clothing, shorts down low, shirt high beneath your armpits, pale white and trembling, stomach that writhes, that points; the rain, when it comes, is mother to every vice.
~~Exit, End.