Mon valet et moi: Roman cocasse

by Hervé Guibert

French

Genres: Fiction, Queer, France, LGBT, Novella, Literary Fiction, French Literature

89 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published August 30, 1991

About the author

(Saint-Cloud, 14 décembre 1955 - Clamart, 27 décembre 1991) est un écrivain et journaliste français. Son rapport à l'écriture se nourrit pour l'essentiel d'autobiographie et d'autofiction1. Il est également reconnu comme photographe et pour ses écrits sur la photographie.

Hervé Guibert est issu d’une famille de la classe moyenne d’après guerre. Son père est inspecteur vétérinaire et sa mère ne travaille pas. Il a une sœur, Dominique, plus âgée que lui. Ses grand-tantes, Suzanne et Louise, tiennent une place importante dans son univers familial. Après une enfance parisienne (XIVe arrondissement), il poursuit des études secondaires à La Rochelle. Il fait alors partie d’une troupe de théâtre : la Comédie de La Rochelle et du Centre Ouest. Il revient à Paris en 1973, échoue au concours d'entrée de l’Idhec à l'âge de 18 ans.

Homosexuel, il construit sa vie sentimentale autour de plusieurs hommes. Trois d’entre eux occupent une place importante dans sa vie et son œuvre : Thierry Jouno, directeur du centre socioculturel des sourds à Vincennes rencontré en 1976, Michel Foucault dont il fait la connaissance en 1977 à la suite de la parution de son premier livre La Mort propagande et Vincent M. en 1982, un adolescent d’une quinzaine d’années, qui inspire son roman Fou de Vincent. Il est un proche du photographe Hans Georg Berger rencontré en 1978 et séjourne dans sa résidence de l’Ile d’Elbe.

Il est pensionnaire de la Villa Médicis entre 1987 et 1989, en même temps qu'Eugène Savitzkaya et Mathieu Lindon. Ce séjour inspira son roman L'Incognito.

En janvier 1988, il apprend qu’il est atteint par le sida. En juin de l’année suivante, il se marie avec Christine S., la compagne de Thierry Jouno. En 1990, il révèle sa séropositivité dans son roman À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie - qui le fait connaître par ailleurs à un public bien plus important. Cette même année il est l'invité de Bernard Pivot dans Apostrophes. Ce roman est le premier d'une trilogie, composée également du Protocole compassionnel et de l'Homme au chapeau rouge. Dans ces derniers ouvrages, il décrit de façon quotidienne l'avancée de sa maladie.

Il réalise un travail artistique acharné sur le SIDA qui inlassablement lui retire ses forces, notamment au travers de photographies de son corps et d'un film, La Pudeur ou l'Impudeur qu'il achève avec la productrice Pascale Breugnot quelques semaines avant sa mort, ce film est diffusé à la télévision le 30 janvier 1992.

Presque aveugle à cause de la maladie, il tente de mettre fin à ses jours la veille de ses 36 ans. Il meurt deux semaines plus tard, le 27 décembre 1991, à l'hôpital Antoine-Béclère. Il est enterré à Rio nell'Elba près de l'ermitage de Santa Catarina (rive orientale de l'Ile d'Elbe).

Les textes d'Hervé Guibert se caractérisent par la recherche de simplicité et de dépouillement. Son style évolue sous l'influence de ses lectures (Roland Barthes, Bernard-Marie Koltès ou encore Thomas Bernhard, ce dernier "contaminant" ouvertement le style de A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie).

Hervé Guibert compose de courts romans aux chapitres de quelques pages, qui se fondent souvent sur des faits biographiques maquillés de fiction. Le lecteur est saisi par l'intrigue brutalement exposée (ainsi dans Mes parents), et appuyée par des passages au vocabulaire sophistiqué ou par des descriptions crues de tortures ou d'amours charnelles. Ce texte est en grande partie extrait de son journal intime publié en 2001 chez Gallimard (Le Mausolée des amants, Journal 1976-1991).

Il travaille avec Patrice Chéreau avec qui il coécrit le scénario de L'Homme blessé qui obtient le César du meilleur scénario en 1984, mais aussi avec Sophie Calle. Journaliste, il collabore dès 1973 à plusieurs revues. Il réalise des entretiens avec des artistes de son époque comme Isabelle Adjani, Zouc ou Miquel Barceló qui fait plus de 25 portraits de lui. Il écrit des critiques de photographie et de cinéma au service culturel du journal L

Reviews

[Sam Bolton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Toxic old man virus yaoi so powerful that I'll be thinking about it for years.

[Morgan Thomas]

Reading for the bookclub I run at work with my friend called "batshit bookclub". I'm trying to articulate what I think and I'm not sure. I don't know if it was what I expected. I had a constant back and forth of wondering who was really doing the dominating and submitting. I figured the narrator would but he doesn't. I suppose as you get older and your body stops functioning and you need someone to take care of you, you're always at the mercy of someone else. Why, I started to wonder does he subject himself to such treatment?
In the translators note he says it's because the manservant is AIDS which is something I'll be thinking about in the context of the story. This would also make sense in the context of the characters actions. Sometimes at the hands of illness there are moments of lucidity and you can think you came out on top.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the last of Guibert's books to be published in his lifetime, which means he was probably deathly ill when he wrote it. The writing is (as expected) cold, sharp and visceral. I'm amazed how horrific and funny (!) this can be.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an unnerving little book! Guibert takes us through a rapidly twisty-turny & devolving relationship fraught with obsession, interiority, and the inescapability of a declining illness and the reliance it forces upon you. Rife with the dark surrealism of French literature. Quite a bit sad, quite a bit deranged and funny, and razor sharp.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

best read in accompaniment to Guibert’s other work in translation, particularly To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. Without the context of AIDS, the book reads as cruel and only marginally more tolerable than Houllebecq. As the translator notes at the end, the title of this book is also a pun: the manservant is me. While certainly shocking for it’s time, it’s far more bearable than, say, Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”. I don’t expect it will be warmly received by American audiences without context.

[Viola · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe it’s his last book before AIDS took him down. Guibert’s intimacy with death isn’t disguising it in false hope or sentiment. It gives me goosebumps how light yet simultaneously callous his writing is. Trully the gay icon!

[W · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a freaky little book. I thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between these two characters, particularly the depravity of it all. Death. Aids. Trust.

[Isa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eindelijk weer een 5 sterren read. Ik wil alles van deze man lezen EN alles wat er op lijkt. Zo gaaf!!!!!

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was super short and super strange. An old man talks about having a 'manservant" who takes care of him. The story takes a dark and disturbing turn but it is too short to really leave a lasting impression. This book was originally written in French and it definitely falls into the novella category. Being a fast reader, I finished it within about 45 minutes. I can't say I hated it, but it was definitely a bit too short and too strange (Even for me).

[aiden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an odd little book. The story is of course moving but in a way which twists the mind and emotions of the reader. There is a twist in the book which is so effective in disturbing and disgusting the reader. The book itself is very well written, Guibert is incredible with the structure of this book. The short sections give a feeling of everything slipping away in a hurry. Read between the lines to really experience this story. Truly moving but some decompression time after is needed.

[Cory · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm no longer sure at all whether my manservant is my son or my father." If a novel could ever be called "AIDS and its Metaphors," this is it. I didn't pick up on the metaphor itself until the translator's note at the end, which completely rewired my understanding of the book. Devilish and cheeky, even in the throes of death. Demands a revisit.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Honestly I ought to hate writing. I'd like to be in my manservant's head, to think his thoughts. I'd write better. He's wily, unpredictable, but he's got a heart of gold. When he pricks me, I don't feel this rush of heat anymore bubbling up to my head and coming back down while warming me up all the way to the tips of my toes, I who'd always felt cold there and in my heart and my balls as well. My manservant injects me and it hurts because there's no flesh to prick anymore, but that's all.

No pleasure, no relief, no forgetting.”

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

lu d'une traite à la bibliothèque. une charmante petite histoire sur un homme âgé quelque peu masochiste et son jeune valet viril et sadique. La fiction de Guibert s’inscrit parfaitement dans la tradition transgressive française

[Arcadia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book so freaky got me asking my boyfriend why the French love to be perverts. (heartbreaking book)

[Cameron Quijada · Rating 2 out of 5]

absolutely sickening read. good commentary on debility and caretaking

[Leah]

nice to have an introduction sometimes because I wasn't getting all that

[Benjamin Doughty · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s the Japanese all over again. I first learned of him at a talk by Maggie Nelson, which I guess makes sense. Funny, sad, hard to read (even though I finished it over breakfast in my new garden), at times nightmarish. Found the shoes most interesting

[Kyle C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an intensely unsettling psycho-thriller. The narrator is a dying, elderly playwright, the lucky heir to a family fortune, who has hired a young man—recently released from a youth prison and struggling to break out as an actor—to be his manservant, to take care of him, drive him around, and administer his drugs. The premise is bizarre but the sequence of events entirely predictable. Care quickly turns into control. The young manservant soon proceeds to fire all the house staff; he insists on access to all his bank accounts; he refuses to allow his employer into his own room. He is secretive and standoffish, insisting on better clothes, making racist tirades, and complaining about his employer. Yet the narrator cannot see the manipulation. Instead he wonders why his manservant doesn't leave him; he watches how delicately his manservant shaves his face without ever cutting him, how he towels his body without judging or even seeing his decrepit body and genitals, while he himself can only feel self-disgust. The employer feels he has to reward his manservant by taking him on a lavish pleasure-trip to Thailand. In his ruminating funk, the narrator in fact wonders if he is the exploiter in the relationship. Having grown up in a privileged aristocratic family, he thinks back to his youth and its cosmopolitan specter of hired help—"Budapesti tavern youths in white clothes and golden buttons, Moroccan bellhops with fezzes, Japanese taxi-drivers wearing cotton gloves". In one moment of candor, he tells his manservant he would hire a Japanese man who would be more "subservient". Is he just another wealthy colonist expecting the people around him to serve and please him?

This is a sharp portrait of codependency and vulnerability. In simple prose, Guibert describes the small humiliations and awkward intimacies that form between patient and carer. The manservant dutifully cleans urine off his employer's body and peels off the loose skin around his bedsores. Whatever his wealth and success, the employer has to surrender his body to a mercurial young man whose loyalty he can only buy. When he falls to the ground, he cannot move until the manservant comes; when his manservant begins stealing his morphine, the employer has no one else to go to. He is entirely dependent on the manservant. Ironically, the only secret that the employer fervently wants to keep is the royalties from his plays and the memoir he is writing. The only thing he cannot share or cede to another is his status as an author.

This is a sparse novella. Its premise reminds me of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? but its style is terse and grim.

[erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

simply terrified of aging. i realize that i stopped right before the manipulation took full reigns. ngl, i thought it was going to skew more into a homo-eroticism arc. it’s simply disgusting how people take advantage of people and fight people that have absolutely no power to fight back. somehow, i think it’s a common idea for sick (twisted) people to enact they’re most vindictive and deranged attitudes on people because technically there aren’t any consequences. it’s absolutely so disheartening to hear how senior citizens are treated by their handlers behind closed doors. when beginning this, you get the inkling of little ways his manservant is going to begin to manipulate him. it begins with relieving everyone around him who could pose a threat so the protagonist had no one to turn to. when jim (manservant) began to show his machiavellian way of thinking where he was able to pick people apart by spotting their vices, he began to master his art of blackmail. i had the suspicion that this was going to take a turn, but hoped it wouldn’t tbh. another thing i liked to point out is that the racism was absolutely on purpose. it was to affirm that he was a hateful individual who harbored ill intentions. the one that stuck me the most was how he made him sit in his own piss in the bathtub, to then eventually turn into hitting and kicking him. it made me so sad. when i was in my early 20s i preached "old people should all die" all day long but now i realize the true terror of aging and sickness. your body fails you while your mind is in tact until eventually it spills into absolute senility. horrifying. besides the plot, i think i picked up on guibert's style for this too. you can almost feel his paranoia as he thinks that his manservant is going to get a hold of his writing until eventually he ceases to even care. another thing i noticed is how haunting it made the prose to spell out the actions very plain and simple rather than creating grotesque imagery. it almost made you create it on your own and sit in disbelief. finally, i also think it’s intentional when adjectives such as "unpredictable" were used repeatedly. it showed how the protagonist was losing the remaining semblance of his functional artist mind. anyways. i caught that it was satire but still… oof

[Jee Koh · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an odd experience to read these two slim books one after another, Hervé Guibert's My Manservant and Me (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman) and Augusto Monterroso's The Gold Seekers (translated by Jessica Sequeira). Both books were written towards the end of the lives of the acclaimed authors. Both play with the conventions of a memoir, Guibert by fictionalization, Monterroso by fragmentation. There the similarities end. Whereas Guibert focuses on the decrepitude of age and the ambiguous help that youth can give, Monterroso searches for the origins of things in childhood and the influence of the adults at the beginning. Not just the contents but the ambitions differ too. My Manservant and Me aims to be a small masterpiece, but The Gold Seekers, which covers only the first fifteen years of its author's life, ends intentionally incomplete. Although both books contains surreal elements, yet their approach is very different. Guibert gives a surrealistic twist to life, whereas Monterroso already finds life to be surreal. Could the differences, in terms of ambition, content, and style, be attributed to their authors' movement or lack thereof? In his book, Guibert writes with the confidence of man who has lived all his life in Paris and who has never had to fear exile. In contrast, Monterroso, born in Honduras, moving constantly with his parents between Honduras and Guatemala, and finally exiling himself in Mexico, has an abiding sense of the transient.

[Ryan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I begin my journey through Hervé Guibert’s bibliography with his last written work, and with My Manservant & Me, I have found an incredible, concise, and beautifully written look at illness as it overtakes the reality of the human body. Composed while his body was facing the progression of the AIDS virus, Guibert crafts the characters of the eighty year old narrator and the manservant who gradually and cruelly overtakes his life as metaphors for both himself and the disease that was, in a sense, eating him alive, allowing the reader to truly see the reality of Guibert’s life through the lens of a palpable and unflinching memoir. While some portions of the book provided a barbed, satirical look at life, many sections filled me with an immense sadness, especially knowing that this book was essentially a fictionalized report of what Guibert thought his life would be like at an age that he would never reach, having died at thirty-six. A thoughtful, quick, and endlessly readable novel, I’m more than excited to dive deeper into Guibert’s work to see the greater breadth of his creative output.

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

If this novella were to be a film, the narrator-- 'me'-- would have to have been played by Helmut Berger. (Too bad he just passed away.) The 80 year-old is bitter and infantalized. He's cared for by a young manservant who gives him fashion advice that makes the narrator also seem like an 18 year old-- Nikes instead of stuffy old leather slip ons. The narrator is unsavory in his casual snootiness, his old school racism and classism. He's a dandy, a "bitter" one at that, and addicted to morphine. He's unsavory like Helmut. (Maybe now Udo Kier would have to step in and channel some Fassbinder energy.) It's dark, ugly, and witty stuff. Even the print is large, as though addressing those with failing eyesight. The intro notes how Guibert, who died in his 30s, was very much the narrator, his body wasted, his youth lost. This adds some poignancy to this wonderfully unsavory literary bon bon.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a word? Interesting.


My Manservant and Me is the last book French writer Hervè Guibert published before his death from AIDS. Written in the throes of his illnesses, this allegorical story has a sharp yet humorous tone. Guibert writes baldly and graphically about the deterioration of the body, while never mentioning AIDS in the text. The protagonist is an elderly man who hires a young manservant to take him through the end of his days, growing increasingly powerless as the manservant takes over his life.

[Saul Demmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was short but it took me a month to read, I just kept reading the same pages. I listen to my manservant all day when he isn't giving me the silent treatment..
Who does that remind me of?
I like the repetition. I would like to be in my manservants mind.
Of course it is about AIDS, I knew that going in. But i don't know if i would have gathered had i not known. I cant understand who is in charge. Usually, I guess, it is more complex. Am I a hammer or a nail, or a screw or a frame.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This novelette, written as the author is publicly dying of AIDS, winks at Dostoevsky in depicting a brutish manservant doubling the author. Despite displaying different facets of monstrosity, both Sir and Jim provide flashes of humor, pathos, and insight in this tightly styled narrative.

The accompanying translator's note and introduction are welcome additions.

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

To fully appreciate the quelled brilliance of the text, three things are paramount: a careful perusal of Shiv Kotecha's introduction, a fundamental understanding of the context of Guibert's life (and works), as well as Jeffrey Zuckerman's note on the translation.

[Vanessa (V.C.) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was quite unexpected, thrilling, and horrifying all at once. The last of this author’s works in his lifetime which gives My Man Servant and Me resonate even more in such a dark and haunting way.

[Avi · Rating 3 out of 5]

a piece of literature that grabbed me by the hair on the back of my head and forced me to look up at the writer's conceptualization of his fame and experience of dying from AIDS. it's brutal and reads like the smell of the urine the author describes. but it should.

[Steven Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fascinating/disturbing hour-long diversion into the most demented relationship you can imagine.

[sean]

pretty good but when it comes to depictions of incontinence and adult diapers in literature i'm going to have to vote for daša drndić's doppelgänger