Mausoleum of Lovers
- 584 pages
- 21 hours of reading
The long-awaited English-language translation of Hervé Guibert's arresting journals
Hervé Guibert Books
December 14, 1955 – December 27, 1991
Hervé Guibert was a French writer and journalist whose work drew primarily from autobiography and autofiction. His style, influenced by authors like Roland Barthes and Thomas Bernhard, was characterized by a pursuit of simplicity and sparseness, often employing sophisticated vocabulary and raw descriptions. Guibert's short novels, frequently based on biographical facts interwoven with fiction, draw the reader into brutally presented narratives. In his later works, reflecting his experience with AIDS, he chronicled the daily progression of his illness and artistically explored his own body and suffering.
"Guibert is perhaps France's best known author of AIDS narratives. This brief, literary rumination of photography was written in response to Barthes's Camera Lucida. Guibert combines explorations of the artistic process with memoir, revealing his particular experience and vision of the world as he tries to express what he would have caught in photographs he attempted to take but missed through technical mistakes."--Publisher info
Cytomegalovirus is a lucid and spare autobiographical narrative by Herve Guibert (1955-1991) of the everyday moments of his hospitalization due to complications of AIDS. In one of his last works, the acclaimed writer presents his struggle with the disease in terms that are unsentimental and deeply human.
Letters to Eugene
- 144 pages
- 6 hours of reading
Hervé Guibert's incandescent correspondence with Belgian poet Eugène Savitzkaya.In 1977, Hervé Guibert discovered the first novel written by Eugène Savitzkaya, Mentir, and sent him his La mort propagande, which had just been published. In the following years, they exchanged the books they had written, read each other, appreciated each other. They saw each other rarely, however: one lived in Liège, the other Paris.A turning point occurred in 1982, when Hervé published "Lettre à un frère d'écriture," in which he declared to Eugène, "I love you through your writing." The tone had changed; Hervé, obsessed with his correspondent, wrote him increasingly incandescent letters. 1984 would, however, see the sudden extinguishing of that passion. A deep friendship replaced it, which found itself with new areas to explore: the adventure of publishing L'Autre Journal and at the Villa Medicis, where they were both fellows. These nearly eighty letters, exchanged between 1977 and 1987, form a correspondence that is all the more unique for being the only one whose publication was authorized by Guibert. An intersection of life and writing, self and other, reality and fiction, their release is a renewal of Guibert's oeuvre.
A New York Times Book of the Year After being diagnosed with AIDS, Hervé Guibert wrote this devastating, darkly humorous and personal novel, chronicling three months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life. In the wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to another, from holidays to test centres, and charts the highs and lows of trying to cheat death. On publication in 1990, the novel scandalized French media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend Michel Foucault. The book became a bestseller, and Guibert a celebrity. The book has since attained a cult following for its tender, fragmented and beautifully written accounts of illness, friendship, sex, art and everyday life. It catapulted Guibert into notoriety and sealed his reputation as a writer of shocking precision and power.
A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century's most beloved French gay writers. My Manservant and Me is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle his master's finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master's wardrobe, sleeps in his master's bed, and yet won't let him watch variety television. My Manservant and Me reveals the rude specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and stylistic abjection. This manservant won't be going anywhere.
Written in Invisible Ink
- 272 pages
- 10 hours of reading
Stories that map the writer's artistic development, written with candor, detachment, and passion.
Homme Au Chapeau Rouge
- 165 pages
- 6 hours of reading
Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel, geboren 1959, lebt in Berlin. Er übersetzt u. a. auch Jean Echenoz, Édouard Louis, Jon Fosse, Tomas Espedal und Tarjei Vesaas. Ausgezeichnet wurde er mit dem Jane Scatcherd-Preis, dem Paul-Celan-Preis des Deutschen Literaturfonds und dem Straelener Übersetzerpreis der Kunststiftung NRW (zusammen mit Frank Heibert).
