NICOLAS PAGES
20 eur
Published in 1999 and awarded that year’s Prix de Flore, Nicolas Pages marks a departure from the Sadean preoccupations of Guillaume Dustan’s first three novels; it is, in essence, a love story. Inspired by a failed romance with the Swiss artist-writer Nicolas Pages and collaging texts that Dustan initially produced for a wide variety of other occasions (magazine articles, short stories, project notes, shopping lists, and more), the “auto-/bio-/porno-graphic” prose of Nicolas Pages is by turns trashy and encyclopedic, corporeal and philosophical. Here Dustan inaugurates a “gay literature” that is no longer painful or shameful, but epicurean and cheerful without ever lapsing into idealism. A vibrant plea for gay rights and a tapestried text that is more than the sum of its many styles, Nicolas Pages is a call to explore the body, sexuality, and writing in all their variety; it is a hymn to life, humanity, pleasure, and desire.
“Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. Politics, despair, drugs, music, joy. Dustan remains the sexiest and most radical writer of the late years of the AIDS epidemic in France after Hervé Guibert. From the almost cognitive experience of anal fucking to the critique of social and family institutions, Dustan uses queer sexuality and writing to extract himself from the bourgeois context in which he evolved until his early thirties (he was a judge until he discovered he was HIV positive) to overcome the shame of being outcast as sick and to discover the joy of being alive. Intimate and ferocious at the same time, dazzling and unapologetic. Porn reaches grace and beauty. Dustan was my first editor and my master. Don’t miss his books.”
—Paul B. Preciado, author of An Apartment on Uranus