Sweet Tooth (French Literature) [Paperback]

Yves Navarre (Author), Donald Watson (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006 | Series: French Literature

This is a brilliant, uncompromising novel by one of the early innovators of gay literature. Anonymous sexual encounters and unbridled lust slowly merge into love in this stunning work from a legend of quality gay literature. Hubert Selby Jr.'s Brooklyn. Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles. Henry Miller's Paris. Gritty, brutal and uncompromising - and all drawn from the same lines as Yves Navarre's New York, a city of muggings, cockroach-infested apartments, dank hospitals and casual murder. Strip-lights flickering in subterranean parking lots; overcrowded subways sweaty with the possibility of violence; averted faces, dark alleys, the pale green skin of a junkie in his last cold turkey. Scrawny backstreet cats fighting amongst overflowing garbage cans, the hard sounds of sex and rage rattling off fire escapes, smeared windows, stained and crowded walls. This is New York way before zero tolerance, way before 9/11, when Broadway was still dangerous and the city was crammed with fear and beauty. Into its sooty mouth walks Luc, a French visitor whose life collides with those of Rasky and Lucy in a series of raw encounters as sensual and sensory as the tastes of the city itself. From his disconcerting arrival at Customs to Navarre's incredible, macabre ending, every step of Luc's odyssey is recounted with shocking candour and spectacular detail. The unheralded precursor of a mainstream canon and one of the most influential gay novels ever written, "Sweet Tooth" is an awesome work from a writer of incomparable talent.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Our Share of Time is among the most moving stories of our time, revealing both the pain and joy that is I' amour toujours.'"

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr; Tra edition (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564784444
• ISBN-13: 978-1564784445
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,325,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A gritty, brutal, and shocking chronicle of the dark side of American life, August 8, 2006

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sweet Tooth (French Literature) (Paperback)

Ably translated by Donald Watson, Sweet Tooth by the award winning French novelist Yves Navarre (1940-1994) is a novel about a French journalist who comes to New York to see a dying former lover. The city he experiences is cold and unforgiving, prone to the macabre, consuming passions, and naked lust that wishes it were love. A gritty, brutal, and shocking chronicle of the dark side of American life, Sweet Tooth makes no attempt to veil the horrors of human nature's ugly side.

4.0 out of 5 stars The French James Purdy, August 8, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sweet Tooth (French Literature) (Paperback)

Navarre lists his own characters with the detached observation of a book reviewer and suggests a way to look at the plot of his novel to boot (p. 62): "Luc, thirty-three years old, a played-out journalist; Rasky, forty-seven years old, an overblown playboy; Lucy, forty-nine years old, a typist who has gone adrift; here in one act of forty chapters is an account of their attempt to run away from themselves." The book is a grim, unsparing allegory in which no character, at least no one French, will ever find happiness in New York, and thus it seems like a cautionary tale, and it certainly leaves one with the squeamish feeling that the next time you feel like having abandoned sex on the west side piers of Manhattan, don't. Just stay at home. Of course the piers are largely a closed chapter in gay New York history, and the scenes in which Luc wanders like a lonely cloud with his fly unzipped to reveal his white briefs to strangers, and comb the docks for anonymous sex, have a period charm Navarre (who died in 1994) could not have imagined during his lifetime.

If the copy from Dalkey Archive can be credited, Newsday says that SWEET TOOTH is "a universally appealing tale about the difficulty of finding and keeping relationships." That has to be one of the most bizarre summings up of a book I have ever read! Rasky is dying of syphilis, which Navarre annoyingly personalizes as "Dame Syphy," and Luc comes to visit him from France. The two of them reminisce about lovers they've had and lovers they expect to have if they live.

Luc meets a man of mixed race, half Puerto-Rican, half black, who works in a florist shop, and goes home with him. Big mistake. Maybe the mistake was calling him "Chocolate," as an endearment, that would enrage anyone. Butas I read through SWEET TOOTH it's clear that good taste wasn't Yves Navarre's forte. His strengths include his horrifying imagination, in which Luc's gradual torture and mental dismantling by his pickup are brilliantly evoked, as though James Purdy had written the scenario to Pasolini's "SALO." He's not very good at portraying women, if the typist Lucy is any indication. All she does of interest is go to the premiere of a Broadway musical called, "Pepper," a typical 70s flop, but one featuring a big title number Ethan Mordden would crack wise over, one in which the chorus boys and girls shout over and over again, "Pepper! Pepper! Pepper!" a la Jerry Herman's MAME or DOLLY.

I'd rate it higher except for Donald Watson's tepid translation. Did Watson do this translation recently? I have the feeling Dalkey Archive is fobbing us off with an old piece of British crud. The UKisms in the text are glaring, "storey" for the floors in a building, "pants" for briefs or whatever, and so on and so forth amen.

"Is your novel autobiographical," asks one New Yorker. "My novel is exobiographical: I drive out all those characters inside me who refuse to remain anonymous." Whatever the pros and cons of SWEET TOOTH, it is not a "universally appealing tale about the difficulty of finding and keeping relationships."