The Story of Elsa by Joy Adamson

The Story of Elsa by Joy Adamson

I'd find it amusing if, in a few centuries, the only thing that our descendents condescend to retain of our artistic production, the only thing in which they'll see worlds to admire, to penetrate, the only thing that they'll show off as precious in immense museums after having flushed down the toilet all our acknowledged masterpieces, the only thing that will give them nostalgia and love for us will be our porn.--from Diary of an Innocent

Exiled from the prestigious French literary circles that had adored him in the 1970s, novelist Tony Duvert's life ended in anonymity. In 2008, nineteen years after his last book was published, Duvert's lifeless body was discovered in the small village of Thor -la-Rochette, where he had been living a life of total seclusion.

Now for the first time, Duvert's most highly crafted novel is available in English. Poetic, brutally frank, and outright shocking, Diary of an Innocent recounts the risky experiences of a sexual adventurer among a tribe of adolescent boys in an imaginary setting that suggests North Africa. More reverie than narrative, Duvert's Diary presents a cascading series of portraits of the narrator's adolescent sexual partners and their culture, and ends with a fanciful yet rigorous construction of a reverse world in which marginal sexualities have become the norm.

Written with gusto and infused with a luminous bitterness, this novel is more unsettling to readers today than it was to its first audience when published in French in 1976. In his openly declared war on society, Duvert presents a worldview that offers no easy moral code and no false narrative solution of redemption. And yet no reader will remain untouched by the book's dazzling language, stinging wit, devotion to matters of the heart, and terse condemnation of today's society.

JOY ADAMSON was born in 1910 in Austria and received her education in Vienna. She travelled to Kenya to visit friends when she was twenty-six years old and stayed there until her death in 1980. She was a well-known painter and photographer who was commissioned by the Kenyan government to paint portraits of African tribesmen and photograph the indigenous flora of East Africa, for which she was awarded the Royal Horticultural Society's Grenfell Gold Medal. She was the author of two further novels, Living Free and Forever Free, in addition to launching the Elsa Wild Animal Appeal, which was dedicated to the protection of wildlife. George Adamson, the Senior Game Warden of Kenya's Northern Frontier Province, was her husband.