Guibert's autobiographical novel is in a class of its own in handling the frightening reality of aids in the late 80s from the perspective a young celebrity, himself, who witnesses the loss of his famous friend (Michel Foucault in real life), and then his own sense of being. But along with the suspense there is also disarming honesty, courage, and humor. Despite the praise it received, too many people have missed the experience of this book. And amazingly almost no one has read its sequel, a lesser work technically--understandably because it was written in his last months--a dazzingly farewell called The Compassion Protocol.

This is clearly Guibert at his cruellest and funniest!

This novel was written by French novelist Herve Guibert as he found himself confronted to a growing fame in the French literary milieu. He had never hidden that he was a homosexual, but, in this book, he launches a fierce attack against French families, and more particularly against his own parents. Tenderness is there as well, for instance when the father takes his 12-year-old son to the movies to see a film with Terence Stamp. The mother's absence and the young teenager's fascination for Stamp's beauty coincide, so that this scene is a privileged moment of father-son complicity.

The novel is made of very short chapters and striking aphorisms, with pervasive Nietszchean undertones. The various fragments make up a direct autobiography with no clear chronology.

This is probably the book which illustrates best Guibert's theory that through abundance of real details you manage to escape reality and to build up a real work of fiction. Namely, the crude details pile up without ever making sense from the point of view of biography. On the contrary, what Guibert does, at the end of the day, is much more autography than just autobiography. He transforms his own existence into words. The structure of fiction replaces the tangible reality of life.

Guibert died in 1991 at the age of 36. His last major achievement was his tetralogy in which he explored his journey through AIDS and towards death (A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauve la vie, Le protocole compassionnel, L'homme au chapeau rouge, Cytomegalovirus). He was a prolific writer and an impressive photographer too.

Bibliography: Read his books !

French writer Marie Darrieussecq has written two university memoirs on Guibert's work.

I wrote an article entitled "Image et texte" (in JARDINS D'HIVER, Paris, Presses de l'ENS, 1997), in which I analyse the links between photography and literature in Guibert's work.

Guillaume Cingal

Very disappointing. This poetry is all defense, no rapture. Guest has managed to go from unsung to overrated without a proper period of acknowledged mediocrity.

This is a beautifully produced book that provides the best entry into the strange and elusive poetry of Barbara Guest, one of the original "New York" poets who has only in the past 10 years come to be more widely recognized. Readers attuned to innovative poetry appreciate Guest for her charmed, ethereal elegance and her elliptical narratives. Check out "A Handbook of Surfing" and "The Emphasis Falls on Reality."

Sarkonak obviously loves his subject and possesses a well of knowledge regarding it, but this book makes for terrible reading. Not really a biography, not really an academic critique, the book wanders willy-nilly over the life of Guibert, sensationalizing it throughout and never producing anything but the most banal of theses (such as, for example, that Guibert attempted to redefine "family").

I, for one, love gossip and sensationalism as much as the next person (perhaps even more), but Sarkonak crowds out the details with embarrassingly terrible explication. One would expect that a writer who includes Foucault and Barthes in his narrative would have read them closely, but there's no idication here that Sarkonak has more than a shallow familiarity with their works. How, for example, could someone familiar with Foucault even imagine suggesting that homosexuality is a genetic trait? Just as deplorable, Barthes' admittedly sloppy "punctum" gets dragged all over Sarkonak's text till it resembles pure schlock.

All that said, I have to confess that I'm glad this book exists. There's so little in English about Guibert that this book fills an important space for the English reader/thinker. It's also painstakingly documented and full of (perhaps even overburdened by) quotations in the original French. Also, Sarkonak's readings of Guibert's photographs are interesting and suggestive, if often off-the-mark.