ART

Tony Duvert District

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663306 Acqn 27710
Pb 12x18cm 56pp 10.50

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
squarethe 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 outcasts tour of city lifefrom construction site to metro, from bar to
brothelan analysis of communal living in the conditional tense from the perspective of the
absolute exile. One of Duverts 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.

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 moulded, moved and absorbed by its spaces.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Oscar A. H. Schmitz Hashish

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663313 Acqn 27711
Pb 12x18cm 184pp 13ills 13.95

First published in German in 1902, Hashish is a collection of decadent, interwoven tales of

Satanism, eroticism, sadism, cannibalism, necrophilia and death.

Encountering the enigmatic dandy Count Vittorio Alta-Carrara in a Parisian eatery, the narrator
finds himself invited to a Hashish Club, where in the dim light of red-filtered candles, a roomful
of recumbent wanderers explores the abyss of the unconscious. The narrator and the count don
a variety of identities as they in turn enter the narratives, sometimes participating in them, other
times merely observing them from the vantage point of a shifting divan. Engaging in romantic
liaisons with masks and cadavers, taking part in Satanic orgies and carnivals, plotting blasphemy
and riding carriages through cityscapes where time loses its bearings, the protagonists draw the
reader into their narrative and psychological unmooring.
A forgotten yet important chapter in the lineage of German fantastic and decadent literature, this
translation of Hashish is illustrated throughout with drawings by the authors brother-in-law, Alfred
Kubin, from the books second, 1913 German edition.

Oscar A.H. Schmitz (18731931) lived the life of a literary dandy. Although best remembered in
Germany for his second book, Hashish, and the decadent lineage it helped inaugurate in German
letters, his output was wide-ranging, from Romantic verse to plays and travel books, to a series of
popular non-fiction works on politics, yoga, astrology, etiquette and Jungian psychology.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Pierre Mac Orlan - Mademoiselle Bambu

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663252 Acqn 27712
Pb 15x23cm 240pp 67ills 20

Mademoiselle Bamb is Pierre Mac Orlans take on the spy novel, written and expanded between
1932 and 1966.

Set in Hamburg, London, Palermo, Brest and other ports of call in the anxious Europe of the
1920s and 1930s, Mademoiselle Bamb tells the tales of three secret agents: the melancholic
adventurer and accidental spy, Captain Hartmann; his enigmatic mistress from Naples (and a
double agent for the Germans), Signorina Bamb; and the sinister Pre Barbanon, who retires
from his life of espionage and murder to eke out his troubled days in an aptly named Boarding
House of Usher, where shadows are as likely to strangle a man as they are to haunt him.

Like all of Mac Orlans novels, Mademoiselle Bamb is less a novel than a barometer of societal
unease, crippling melancholy and dark humour.

Pierre Mac Orlan (18821970) was a prolific writer of absurdist tales, adventure novels,
flagellation erotica and essays, as well as the composer of a trove of songs made famous by the
likes of Juliette Grco. A member of both the Acadmie Goncourt and the Collge de
Pataphysique, Mac Orlan was admired by everyone from Raymond Queneau and Boris Vian to
Andr Malraux and Guy Debord.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Tony Duvert - Odd Jobs

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663290 Acqn 27713
Pb 12x18cm 64pp 10.95

This series of 23 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 catalogue 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 evinces an outrageous, uncomfortable and savage sense of humour. Through these
narratives somewhere between parody and prose poem, Duvert assaults parenthood, priesthood
and neighbourhood in this mock handbook to suburban living: Leave It to Beaver as written by
William Burroughs.

Tony Duvert (19452008) earned a reputation as the enfant terrible of the generation of French
authors known for defining the post-war Nouveau Roman. Expelled from school at the age of 12
for homosexuality (and then put through a psychoanalytic cure for his condition), Duvert
declared war on family life and societal norms through a controversial series of novels and
essays (whose frequent controversial depictions of child sexuality and pedophilia often led his
publisher to sell his works by subscription only). He won the Prix Medicis in 1973 for his novel
Strange Landscape. His reputation faded in the 1980s, however, and he withdrew from society.
He died in 2008.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk
 ART

Juan Benet - The Construction of the Tower of Babel

Wakefield Press 2017 ISBN 9781939663320 Acqn 27714
Pb 12x18cm 88pp 5iils 1col 13.50

Juan Benets penultimate book, The Construction of the Tower of Babel brings together two
essays that testify to the multiplicity of the authors interests, both personal and professional.

The titular essay is a meditation on Pieter Bruegel the Elders 1563 painting of the Tower of
Babel: the first painting in European art history to feature a building as a protagonist. An engineer
by trade, Benet brings his knowledge of building construction to bear on Bruegels creation,
examining the archways, pillars, windows and the painters meticulously depicted chaos at the
heart of the edifices centuries-long execution. An unusual analysis of architectural hubris and the
linguistic myth that gave rise to it, Benets essay builds its own linguistic telescoping structure that
could be described as an architextual discourse on the madness of the unending project.

Also included is On the Necessity of Treason (a theme of particular interest to Benet, whose
father was shot by Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, and whose brother was
forced to escape to France, exiled for his Republican sympathies). Benet considers the
essentially dual nature of the spy and the curious World War II cases of Julius Norke and William
Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) to conclude that, within the order of the State, the traitor is not only
necessary, but welcome.

A civil engineer by profession, Spanish writer Juan Benet (192793) began writing to pass the
long nights of solitude he spent on construction sites in Len and Asturias. He self-published his
first novel, You Will Never Amount to Anything, in 1961. In 1967, he won the Biblioteca Breve
Prize for his novel A Meditation.

orders@artdata.co.uk

www.artdata.co.uk