Written in Invisible Ink
Title | Written in Invisible Ink PDF eBook |
Author | Herve Guibert |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 273 |
Release | 2020-05-19 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1635901197 |
Stories that map the writer's artistic development, written with candor, detachment, and passion. Hervé Guibert published twenty-five books before dying of AIDS in 1991 at age 36. An originator of French "autofiction" of the 1990s, Guibert wrote with aggressive candor, detachment, and passion, mixing diary writing, memoir, and fiction. Best known for the series of books he wrote during the last years of his life, chronicling his coexistence with illness, he has been a powerful influence on many contemporary writers. Written in Invisible Ink maps the writer's artistic development, from his earliest texts—fragmented stories of queer desire—to the unnervingly photorealistic descriptions in Vice and the autobiographical sojourns of Singular Adventures. Propaganda Death, his harsh, visceral debut, is included in its entirety. The volume concludes with a series of short, jewel-like stories composed at the end of his life. These anarchic and lyrical pieces are translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman. From midnight encounters with strangers to tormented relationships with friends, from a blistering sequence written for Roland Barthes to a tender summoning of Michel Foucault upon his death, these texts lay bare Guibert's relentless obsessions in miniature.
To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
Title | To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life PDF eBook |
Author | Hervé Guibert |
Publisher | Serpent's Tail |
Pages | 251 |
Release | 2021-08-05 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1782838694 |
With a foreword by Maggie Nelson, an introduction from Frieze editor Andrew Durbin and afterword from Edmund White 'Unforgettable, heartbreaking' New York Times 'Brilliant' - Dazed 'As brutal as it is elegant' - Neil Bartlett 'Electrifying' - Colm Tóibín 'Dazzling' - Katherine Angel 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.
Ghost Image
Title | Ghost Image PDF eBook |
Author | Hervé Guibert |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 161 |
Release | 2014-03-26 |
Genre | Photography |
ISBN | 022613248X |
Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays—meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems—and not a single image. Hervé Guibert’s brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, but its deeply personal contents go far beyond that canonical text. Some essays talk of Guibert’s parents and friends, some describe old family photographs and films, and spinning through them all are reflections on remembrance, narcissism, seduction, deception, death, and the phantom images that have been missed. Both a memoir and an exploration of the artistic process, Ghost Image not only reveals Guibert’s particular experience as a gay artist captivated by the transience and physicality of his media and his life, but also his thoughts on the more technical aspects of his vocation. In one essay, Guibert searches through a cardboard box of family portraits for clues—answers, or even questions—about the lives of his parents and more distant relatives. Rifling through vacation snapshots and the autographed images of long-forgotten film stars, Guibert muses, “I don’t even recognize the faces, except occasionally that of an aunt or great-aunt, or the thin, fair face of my mother as a young girl.” In other essays, he explains how he composes his photographs, and how—in writing—he seeks to escape and correct the inherent limits of his technique, to preserve those images lost to his technical failings as a photographer. With strains of Jean Genet and recurring themes that speak to the work of contemporary artists across a range of media, Guibert’s Ghost Image is a beautifully written, melancholic ode to existence and art forms both fleeting and powerful—a unique memoir at the nexus of family, memory, desire, and photography.
Crazy for Vincent
Title | Crazy for Vincent PDF eBook |
Author | Herve Guibert |
Publisher | National Geographic Books |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2017-03-24 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 1584351993 |
Diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? The chronicle of an obsessive love. In the middle of the night between the 25th and 26th of November, Vincent fell from the third floor playing parachute with a bathrobe. He drank a liter of tequila, smoked Congolese grass, snorted cocaine... —from Crazy for Vincent Crazy for Vincent begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent, a skateboarding, drug-addled, delicate “monster” of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert's life over the span of six years (from 1982, when he first met Vincent as a fifteen-year-old teenager, to 1988). After Vincent's senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered, elevated, and emotionally eviscerated his life, working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent's fragmentary appearances in his journal, the author seeks to understand what Vincent's presence in his life had been: a passion? a love? an erotic obsession? or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book that results: Is it diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? Crazy for Vincent is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself.
Mausoleum of Lovers
Title | Mausoleum of Lovers PDF eBook |
Author | Hervé Guibert |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2014 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 9781937658229 |
The long-awaited English-language translation of Hervé Guibert's arresting journals
Hervé Guibert
Title | Hervé Guibert PDF eBook |
Author | Jean-Pierre Boulé |
Publisher | Liverpool University Press |
Pages | 330 |
Release | 1999-01-01 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9780853238713 |
This is the first full-length study to cover the complete texts of Herveacute; Guibert (1955–1991), offering a thorough documentation of his literary output. The book is guided by Guibert’s relation to the novel, a major line of enquiry throughout, as well as his experimentation with voices in particular. One of Bouleacute;’s main contentions is that Guibert arrives at the creation of a new literary genre, the roman faux, with the publication of his best-known work To the Friend who did not save my life. The book ends by considering the works Guibert produced after he was diagnosed as HIV positive, within the parameter of the voices of the self.
Letters to Eugène
Title | Letters to Eugène PDF eBook |
Author | Herve Guibert |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 129 |
Release | 2022-10-27 |
Genre | Literary Collections |
ISBN | 1635901731 |
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.