STRANGE LANDSCAPE

An indecency, Strange Landscape is a kind of mucous finger-painting about the auto-and-homoerotic activities of a group of boys taken to a strange house (loosely identified as a ""chateau"" here in ""possibly Brittany"") where they spend the hours sodomizing and being sodomized, cheek to cheek. Their names (Claude, Lulu, etc.) are as interchangeable as their flexible parts be they aperture or appendage. Among the clean words which reappear with engorging tedium are pus, piss, and putrid. The dirty words--and Duvert is given to lallocropia--are unrepeatable. The book was awarded one of those indistinguishably meaningless prizes--the Medicis--in 1973 but there are more French literary prizes than in any resort hotel Bingo game. Except for the lack of punctuation (sauf the question mark) and the three or four empty spaces which serve no useful purpose (did not these devices date from the '50's?) it is hard to justify Le Monde's claim that Duvert ""transforms our notion of novelistic time."" He just ""shoots his load"" in the first chapter which leaves you nothing to look forward, or in the interest of geographical accuracy, bum-backward to.