Pazzo di Vincent

by Hervé Guibert, Maria Grazia Ruspoli (Translator )

En autofiktiv dagbog om aids-syg kærlighed af den franske forfatter og fotograf Hervé Guibert – og et monomant gravskrift for den unge Vincent, der invaderede hans dagbøger, oplivede hans tilværelse og fornedrede ham i de seks år, de kendte hinanden.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Queer, France, French Literature, Romance, Gay

74 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

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

[Ereck · Rating 5 out of 5]

As if Éric Rohmer rimmed Noé's Irréversible then exhaled something akin to a novel while a wistful Barthes looked on, this book is. Its reading sends me into, alternately, a buzz, a torpor, a memory, a tumble, a frenzy, a focus, a canniness, a rumination, a languor, and a thrill.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This struck me as a fascinating companion text to Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion , two elegantly slender, elliptical texts that take diametrically opposite approaches to an all-consuming sexual attraction. Both attempt to come to grips with a masochistic yielding to desire for not-particularly-exceptional men, which is perhaps exactly part of the appeal? But where Ernaux is relentlessly cerebral & analytical in her attempt to dissect unexpected ardor, Guibert rapturously gives himself over to be consumed by the flames of desire, eager to be a martyr for love.

Arranged into evocative, aphoristic snippets, Crazy for Vincent almost feels like flipping through an album of snapshots, each capturing an ephemeral emotion and/or image at a particular moment in time to be savored retrospectively.

Characteristically for Guibert, sentiments swoop wildly between the gorgeous & the gross, the sublime & the scatological, often within the span of just several words. What saves it from ever coming across as silly is Guibert's clear-eyed earnestness; in that way he's actually much more like Ernaux than it might seem at first glance.

"He danced to Prince's 'Kiss' with his cock in my mouth; now I could ask him for anything."

[Jack Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

My creative nonfiction teacher from this past fall recommended this book to me as a lesson in how to write impassioned scenes of physical intimacy. It was an effective lesson, as the way Guibert describes his interactions with Vincent is breathless, harried, and evocative. There's something to be appreciated about a queer writer writing about sex so unabashedly, if with a sheen of romanticism. And the approach that Guibert takes with the narrative, presenting the story of his relationship with Vincent backwards, was similarly a fascinating lesson in form.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably do have a weakness for these late 80s/early 90s narratives of doomed romantic obsessions in the time of disease. (Gary Indiana's Horse Crazy, anyone?) But Guibert is his usual lovably imperfect, vulnerable self, the writing is fascinating and affecting, and the translation is elegant.

[Corn8lius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une première pour moi dans les écrits d’Hervé Guibert.
Fou de Vincent raconte la passion amoureuse que ressent l’auteur pour un garçon beaucoup plus jeune que lui.

J’ai trouvé ça aussi beau et émouvant que sordide et malaisant. Le recueil m’a tout de même fait forte impression, et certains passages m’ont énormément touché.

Dans fou de Vincent, ne vous attendez pas à une narration linéaire et consensuelle. Tout est saccadé et flou. C’est une succession de notes extraites d’un journal dont seul Guibert saura en saisir toutes les lignes.
L’auteur a d’ailleurs fait le choix de nous délivrer ses notes à l’envers. L’ouvrage débute donc par la mort de son bien aimé, et remonte jusqu’à leur rencontre.

C’était poignant, j’ai aimé.

[Walker Iversen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He drenched me with saliva, his precious commodity, what he spits on the street"

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd artifact, purportedly Guibert's extracts from his journals, presented in reverse chronological order, detailing his obsession with a much younger and primarily straight boy during the final years of his life, while he himself was expiring from AIDS. Originally published in French in 1989, it has only now been translated into English, and while no longer particularly shocking, it still retains a glimmer of its original power - but is also a bit distasteful overall (focusing on Vincent's various fungal infections and sexual peccadillos, etc.). Still, it can literally be read in an hour, so the time spent on it is mostly worth it.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you’ve ever been in love, you’ll find yourself in the pages of this book

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? The chronicle of an obsessive love.'

'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.'

Both of the above come from the text on the cover of the English edition of 'Crazy for Vincent'. Even if I didn't know that this short novel was originally written in French this type of existential? metaphysical? ontological? 'discourse'? 'premise? analysis? would have identified it as French. It is auto-fiction which is 'a literary genre that blends the author's life with fictional elements. It's a way to explore the complexities of subjectivity and reflect on social structures'. But what does any of it mean? I don't know.

What I know is that this very short little novel, barely 90 pages with a lot of empty white space surrounding each passage, is beautiful, intimate and moving. It inspires questions but also that it is a genuine attempt to define or reconstruct what is loss.

As a real review I offer the one by Edmund White below. What is fascinating is that there are only reviews from readers of the English translation on GR. Is Guibert not read in France anymore? or do French readers post reviews elsewhere? I think Herve Guibert is a fascinating writer but I don't want to read "To the Man Who Did Not Save My Life" and "The Compassion Protocol" the works that cemented Guibert as a great chronicler of AIDS. I don't want to read about AIDS (and I am old enough to have lived through it all. I don't see AIDS as a metaphor, it was a disease, it was never simply a gay disease everyone knew early on that it affected Heroin users, Haitians and Haemophiliacs as well as 'Homosexual' men. Despite prejudice against gays can you imagine that any of the massive investment in research would have been made if it had affected only those Haitians, Heroin addicts and Haemophiliacs? Talk about being powerless?! If Guibert is worth reading he is worth reading without having an AIDS statement to make. 'Crazy for Vincent' suggests he is. I hope to read more of him.

Review by Edmund White from Frieze at: https://www.frieze.com/article/crazy-....

'Hot question: to what extent is another person a drug, whether a stimulant, depressant, hallucinogen or some deranged combination of the three? That’s one of the conundrums haunting Hervé Guibert’s Crazy for Vincent (originally published in 1989 and newly translated by Christine Pichini for Semiotext(e)), a question further addled by the fact that the two male lovers at its centre are forever blitzed on their own marvellous pharmacopoeia: opium (‘brown sugar’), ecstasy (‘that vile white powder’), booze or hash. This slim volume is a diary prone to dreamy wandering that chronicles the true story of Guibert’s infatuation with Vincent Marmousez, a sweet and tender hooligan who sometimes seems closer to a phantom tormenting our narrator – ‘I thought I had seen a ghost’, Guibert notes when Vincent materializes early in their relationship. Crazy for Vincent consists entirely of vertiginous highs or heartbroken comedowns, and kicks off like a lurid thriller with the titular hunk’s corpse laying on the pavement following a tumble from a third floor window. Guibert (who died from AIDS-related illnesses in 1991, aged 36) never megaphones the thought that these circumstances make his inamorato the scuzzy Parisian equivalent of Icarus, but the parallels are difficult to resist. Vincent is a goofy young daredevil watched by a (somewhat) wiser and older artist, he gets too high and dies. Pinpointing these narcotic effects, Guibert also records what the poet John Ashbery once identified as the ‘vast electrical disturbance’ that a rambunctious boy creates for anybody who’s kinda smitten, with their sense of class and sanity lost in the swirl. It’s all very steamy. Guibert remembers getting down to Prince’s ‘Kiss’ at the discotheque (His Royal Purpleness’s vow ‘You don’t have to be beautiful/To turn me on’ set in call-and-response with Vincent’s laments over ‘my ugly face!)’; Guibert calls Vincent ‘an expert at my gratification’. What’s really craved is the tingle from one body entangling with another – ‘nobody’, Guibert claims ‘touches me like this’. Given the timeframe and Guibert’s fate, AIDS skulks in the shadow of all this rapturous activity. ‘You’re really scared of it, huh?’, asks Vincent with a funhouse grin whilst Leos Carax’s magical Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood, 1986) plays at the cinema. In his evocation of Vincent’s body, Guibert also takes mortifying notice of his herpes, scabies and the ‘fungus’ growing on his feet. ‘He says if it’s AIDS, he’ll rob a bank, or maybe he’ll shoot himself during the hold-up.’ What’s hotter to think about is how obeying the demands of the récit (a French form distinguished as something like a philosophical and fragmentary monologue on a lone subject) mimics the feel of true obsession: nothing matters but Vincent. It’s not as if Guibert’s other activities were insignificant. Like his spiritual master Jean Genet, he was one of the great thinkers of queer desire, not to mention an acclaimed critic, screenwriter, novelist and filmmaker. Some of this is acknowledged amidst the craziness, but here even nuclear disaster is a flash in the background: ‘meanwhile a radioactive cloud floats over Europe’, he writes, noting Chernobyl’s meltdown.

'The ramifications of this singular focus are radioactive in their own subtle fashion, with Guibert laying out a world denuded of everything but the material irradiated by Vincent’s touch, including a toy flying saucer that he imagines repurposing as a reliquary for his idol’s ‘sex’. So lucid is the attention Guibert pays to his fluctuating internal world that he can seemingly turn himself inside out on a whim. The book’s substance is revealed in successive freeze-frames that see Guibert (always fascinated by the ghostly effects of photography) stop, bewitched, and consider the next moment of their relationship. A shady picture of him and Vincent hanging out ‘dans l’atelier Balthus’ is reproduced early in the book. Vincent’s precise age is a murky detail, but he must be halfway through his teens, a perfect coeval for the nymphs seen in the French master’s creepy portraits. But Balthus was into girls, while Crazy for Vincent belongs in the tradition of what you might call ‘fucked-up boy art’ – not verifiably straight or gay, but just devoted to ogling the hot wreck of a handsome young thing out of his mind. Vincent doesn’t call himself anything whether he’s hopping into a cerebral dude’s bed or frolicking with a babe – ‘he just got his paycheck and he likes to spend it without me, with girls, the punk’, Guibert snarls. A history of this tradition might begin with Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (c.1593-95), that self-portrait of the artist totally wasted with his flesh tinged green, move through Anne Carson’s ‘verse novel’ Autobiography of Red (1998) and Larry Clark’s entire career, before climaxing with Ryan McGinley’s shots of the late Dash Snow. Who could resist these beautiful hoodlums, even if their company turns out to be fatal? Maybe it’s all about the fascination flowing between a gay chronicler and his hazily ‘straight’ subject, narcotics everywhere stimulating their romance, but an equally disorientating intimacy happens between Guibert and his audience. He traps the experience of being inside a body mad with desire, ‘ready to open up my chest to lay my heart at his feet.’'

[Sam Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books like this are so rare and fun and mysterious it feels like you’re wandering through a forbidden city just by reading its pages. I am enchanted by the perversity and genius of this inscrutable work, and by Guibert’s ability to weave the violence and exultation of the erotic so effortlessly with the mystery of genre itself. We take for granted how much words are foundational to our understanding of the world and this book is a reminder that language is perhaps the only real form of alchemy that exists. Words can destroy, create, and corrupt, often at the same time and especially when it comes to desire, so what an utter thrill it is to be swept up in the sublime pleasure of wondering exactly what it was I just read ❤️

[Jeff Jackson]

Sadly, despite the excellent intro by Bruce Hainley and my general admiration for Semiotext(e), I would not recommended this. Check out "To the Man Who Did Not Save My Life" and "The Compassion Protocol" instead.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 3 out of 5]

"He was fifteen kilometers away, I was dancing with someone else, and yet I gave myself to the dance as if he were watching me, to impress him."

3,5*

[Trevor Church · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and disturbing. A remarkable piece of art.

[malinka]

Guibert écrit si bien mais je peux juste pas noter un journal qui parle d'une histoire « d'amour » avec un gosse…

[nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

beau. triste. dégoûtant. cruel. le fardeau de l'obsession est le fardeau de la vie. l'amour est une route plein de maladie et de dégoût, comme paris le matin. comme la culpabilité après avoir abandonné le sommeil pour vivre. comme le chagrin après un rapport sexuel honteux. c'est mon adolescence, mon histoire. mon corps, mon âme d'adolescent.

merci eli <333

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, the most important book I have read in the past decade for, you know, my, like, journey or whatever, has been the Semiotext(e)-published English translation of Pierre Guyotat's COMA. Here was autobiographical writing as pure literature (whether or not you are inclined to call in a novel). Writing that reflected on lived life and drew forth mammoth, cleansing lessons. COMA changed my world. Fiercely. Now comes another Semiotext(e)-published work of commanding autobiographical French literature in English translation, Hervé Guibert's CRAZY FOR VINCENT, to once again revolutionize my sense of the "possible" (in terms of form, in terms of modes of revelation) and plant seeds in the fertile soil of my creative marrow. What we have here are finessed journal fragments detailing a fraught love affair, carefully cultivated, laid out in reverse chronological order, commencing w/ the death by misadventure of Vincent, the object of Guibert's six-year-long amorous obsession. CRAZY FOR VINCENT name-drops and clearly owes some not inconsiderable debt to Roland Barthes' A LOVER'S DISCOURSE, in that it is likewise a kind of encyclopedia of the highs, lows, and mid-range intensities of amorous life. In Guibert (as in, certainly, my life) the amorous is never particularly healthy, and always coupled w/ at least some degree of codependent disequilibrium. It is not just the despairing, the longing, the losing sleep, and the anxieties that are the malodorous fruits of love and desire. Even the ecstasies have the capacity to annihilate (or at the very least drive one clean over the edge). The starkly fatalistic quality of doomed love is given added dimension in Guibert's extraordinary (almost overwhelming) masterpiece by virtue of the way that all the sex, all the tenderness, all the honest love detailed herein is overhung by the specter of AIDS. (There is a revelation late in the book that absolutely knocked the wind out of me.) It is a short read, easily (it would seem) assimilated in one sitting. I indeed read it over the course of an early afternoon. But I can say w/ something approaching absolute certainty that this profound and eloquent book will be w/ me the rest of my life.

[Mathildewind · Rating 5 out of 5]

leur histoire remontée à l'envers. comme pour revenir à la source et comprendre pourquoi on s'est donné tant de mal. le narrateur est complètement accaparé par cette relation heurtée, par ce garçon devenu homme. comme une drogue. s'y enferme. celui qui attend. Vincent contrôle, le mène en bateau. amour. drogue. sexe. maladie. très beau. triste. cru. violence. on devrait trouver cet amour malsain, et pourtant. chaque caresse, chaque coup de langue paraît être une première fois. tragique.

[Farah Farooq · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s certainly gay. and french

[Arthur · Rating 4 out of 5]

Note à moi-même : ne pas lire ce genre de livre dans le train...

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une autopsie du rapport amoureux. L’écriture de H. Guibert est débridée, provocante, sulfureuse. Elle n’est que le résultat d’une passion dévorante qui coupe le souffle. C’est impudique, érotique, poétique. Ça sent le stupre et la dévotion. Fascinant.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always I am thrilled to read anything by Guibert, but I felt that following the form of the recit made this a bit exhausting to read by focusing solely on the esctasy of fucking Vincent, whereas his other work tends to dwell more broadly around other topics. Also unsure how old Vincent is in this, which adds some concerns around the topic of consent if this is in fact biographical. Hmm.

[olivier]

I’d rate the introduction 5/5.
Content wise I truly dk how to feel. But to paraphrase someone else on HG- some writers could really learn from such an overbearing slut like HG.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dennis Cooper-esque, very experimental, queer, obsession or invention by the author?, many cultural references, interesting structural, linguistically but not really my cup of tea.

[Novi · Rating 4 out of 5]

i bought this for ruby as a little souvenir from my recent trip to visit drexel//read mostly in the train station in Philly.

i feel you herve...i too have been a pining loser lover. desire and grief can make one feel crazy and I love how it is depicted. the fragmented short anecdote style emphasizes how. Guibert is trying to make sense of the on-and-off relationship he had with Vincent as well as his sudden death. love can feel so tender and beautiful yet so humiliating and devastating.

[Nia Holton-Raphael · Rating 5 out of 5]

haunting and beautiful and absolutely nuts. thank you mathilde for a wonderful gift <3

"Barely slept, fully clothed on top of my bed, with the lights on, but in Vincent's arms, happy with each return of his hand to my body, happy that our mouths always seek each other out unconsciously when they should be defeated, and smile at each other. Strangeness and joy of such a resurrection (opium?)"

[Rine Bekkelund · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skal dette liksom være greit? Egentlig 0 stjerner, men 2 stjerner for tre pene setninger som faktisk ga litt inntrykk.

[lélé · Rating 3 out of 5]

« (Comment j'aime Vincent: prêt à m'ouvrir la poitrine pour déposer mon cœur à ses pieds.) »

[Strider · Rating 4 out of 5]

A marvel of intimacy, connection, and the hard grip of aids

4.5/5 (maybe 5/5 when I reread)

Note: reread backward

[Snorre Bertram · Rating 4 out of 5]

læs den forlæns, så læs den baglæns igen

[Louison Lit · Rating 4 out of 5]

Puisque je l’ai vu danser sur cette musique, il réapparaît dans l’espace vide soudain dilaté par la musique.