Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories

by Hervé Guibert, Jeffrey Zuckerman (Editor, translator)

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.

Genres: Short Stories, LGBT, Queer, France, Fiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published May 19, 2020

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

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm really not sure what to make of this collection; different editorial choices might have helped. Zuckerman wrote that the first book "is included here in its entirety not for the quality of its prose". 30 years ago, when I first discovered Guibert, I might have been more excited with 40-odd pages of explicit sex, autopsies, body fluids etc. While it's interesting to see these themes already present early in Guibert's writings, do we really need so much of it? Then there are the three short pieces (30 odd pages) from Singular Adventures; I assume there's more of these. They are sly, thoughtful, intimate and subtly unreliable, very New Narrative. (Think of say Kevin Killian in more subdued moments.) I guess I just have to hope someone translates the rest of the Adventures.

The quirky pieces in Vice, centered around objects such as "The Cat o' Nine Tails" or "The Static Electricity Machine", are also pretty worthwhile. But I also note that we only get 30 odd pages of these, while the French original has over a hundred pages.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A true fanboy when it comes to Hervé Guibert, and an advocate for more translations of the work of this shortlived French master, Written in Invisible Ink was, sadly for me, a bit lost in translation and lacking a central focus.

This, the fourth book of Guibert's to appear in English, is actually a collection of stories published separately in French during Guibert's short life prior to his death from AIDS-related complications. The first half of the book will feel familiar to fans of Guibert: macabre stories of death and sex point to the tensions that lie at the intersection of the two and Guibert's story "Vice" plays with the ways in which everyday objects are fetishized. The later stories, though, feel out of place; these short stories of love, of wax museums, and of "Sunset Boulevard" don't feel like they belong with the earlier stories, and I am just not sure why they were all published together.

This lack of a central editorial vision, mixed with some confusingly translated sentences, make this book okay, and of interest to those like me who love Guibert's writing, though certainly not an ideal book to begin your exploration of Guibert's work.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hervé Guibert is a sensual writer of great talent. Although he passed away, I still use 'is' because his writing is lively and it will never rot and go away. Some of the stories are short-short, but all are passionate in a manner where the sexuality flows easily from page to the reader's mind. Not erotic, but more dealing with the eros of one's thoughts and some action.

[Lars Meijer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ergens vond ik Written in Invisible Ink erg teleurstellend. Het werd me vooral duidelijk waarom Guibert zijn succes/bekendheid dankt aan zijn autofictionele romans, zoals Crazy for Vincent of Cyptomegalovirus. De hoogtepunten uit deze bloemlezing zijn de lugubere Propaganda Death, Propaganda Death No. 0 en de persoonlijke verhalen uit Singular Adventures.

*2,5

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of short writings by Hervé Guibert contains quite a range of work. His early book “Propaganda Death” is a rather self-conscious homage to the dark, violent, sexually explicit strain of French Modernism, both during and after the Surrealists. I personally found these a bit de trop, as they say in French. However, once he gets that off his chest, Guibert’s originality begins to come through. The short pieces in “Vice” feel like the literary equivalent of snap-shots, and I sense in them the influence of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, without the relentless bitterness. Most of the collection is witty, observant, and charming, like someone you met at a café and desperately wanted to take home with you, but your friend took one look at him and said, “That boy is nothing but trouble.”

[Iza Cupial · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Thomas B · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because Singular Adventures is cited in Philippe Besson's Lie With Me, which I adored. This collection of short stories has entries in it that I love and will re-read, but the first half is flat out bad. Some of the first part has the sort of over-the-top smut eroticism that I wrote in high school, fantasizing about the locker room, and yet it almost always punishes the reader for having fun by taking strange and dark turns.

Other reviews mention the odd editorial choice. I share their confusion. Propaganda Death and its second part are the entry to Guibert's work here, apparently because of chronology. I think this is a bizarre decision, because these texts are inaccessible, intentional in their repulsiveness, and frankly they are masturbatory in the author's self-hatred. I know it when I see it. Everything after these are far, far, better. I also think that the others are all excerpts from longer works. What a heartbreak that we have to deal with Guibert's sophomore scatology instead of the love, longing, fucking, and life so present in the rest of the stories.

As with Besson's book, it is lovely to read about gay romance, and gay lust. I haven't read many books with such forceful sex scenes, and these are all a little tainted by strangeness, but I think much of that (apart from the first part of the book) is a bit metaphorical or something. Surely, this isn't the first book I've read with the words "cum" and "jizz" used seriously but it is not out of the question. Some of these take a pretty strange turn, and there is just a hint of magical realism in one or two of the later ones, it feels like.

Ratings & quick notes for each "book":

	* Propaganda Death - 1/5
		* Scatological. Shock-seeking. Clearly trying to gross you out, and sophomoric in its attempt. The sex fantasies are fun until they turn shitty (literally) or otherwise gross-out. There is an incredible self-hatred that the author clearly feels.
	* Propaganda Death No. 0 - 1/5
		* More of the same.
	* Vice - 3/5
		* Somewhat boring, but interesting enough and at least observant.
	* A Route - 3/5
	* The Sting of Love and Other Texts - 4/5
		* Some of these stories are fantastic. Especially For P. Dedication in Invisible Ink and Obituary.
	* Singular Adventures - 4.5/5
		* The reason I bought this book, because this is mentioned in Philippe Breson's Lie With Me.
		* All three of the stories featured here are great. My favorite was A Kiss for Samuel.
	* Mauve the Virgin - 3.5/5.
		* Compelling, very readable. Had less for me to be interested in.

[Sophie]

“my rosette becomes a fashion prototype. I have a lyrical ass” (monologue I)

“just tell your family it’s sauce gribiche” (A Lover’s Brief Journal)

“As for his intimate life, I didn’t want to know anything, I didn’t ask him any questions and when I realized one day that someone had entered his bedroom, and might be able to go into it again, and when, in a conversation, with this truly intense pleasure that consists of talking to a third party about a person one loves, he was on the verge of saying the name, I went deaf by sheer will, and relegated that person to the state of an other, an initial. In front of him, I only spoke of that person as the letter X.” (For P.: Dedication in Invisible Ink)

Life is point 1 of Vertigoes.

“‘She said that she had touched herself when she thought about me last night, to the point of drawing blood. I took her hand so she could touch my chest, so she could measure this emptiness that hollows out my sides, and she said: you have a heart...’ She had torn up this paper, out of fear that her son might find it after her death. She said: ‘In this impossibility of love there will have been all the same a little love…’” (The Desire to Imitate)

“A turntable stood in for the orchestra. We invited the brothers to the house. Uriel was wearing a wedding ring, I asked him who he was married to, and he said, to the light. I fell asleep in sodomy.” (Flash Paper)

when people talk about bataille, and dennis cooper, why do they not talk about guibert? the perfect missing link, the one probing my heart with a stylet so it flutters

[Ryan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Guibert's prose is consistently enthralling, pulling me into a world rife with the feelings of loss, obsession, a dreamy melancholy and, especially early on in this collection, a visceral and violently palpable look into his existence and psyche as a younger man. This collection exists mainly to act as a showcase of Guibert's early texts spanning from the mid-70s to the late-80s, and as such there is a notably change in form and content when reading each section chronologically from the first page to the last. While the tone and overall thematic elements of Guibert's work morph and take on more subtle and, at times, tones of unrequited romantic longing, what remains consistent is his focus upon the body and the effect of the passage of time upon the visible aspects of the human form, along with the introspective elements of feeling, memory, love, and desire. Within a multitude of these stories in which we find ourselves meeting various love interests and acquaintances of Guibert, we also see that Guibert's fantasies, dreams, and hopes involving this cast of characters frequently never move past the confines of his mind, and throughout nearly all of these stories that semblance of regret and inevitable loneliness is felt deeply. As some have said, this is definitely not the first Guibert you want to read, but I found it to be a wonderful insight into the early career of an author that I greatly admire.

[Richard Jespers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Guibert’s early pieces in the book seem almost pornographic, not because they portray sex graphically but because he exhibits such exuberance to shock, like a child who repeatedly shouts “fuck” to get a rise out of others. Pieces in the middle and latter parts of the book are much better, more mature. “The Trip to Brussels,” for example, is nuanced and subtle, where, perhaps the book’s title originates:

“The words we spoke made an apocryphal story that was perfect: faded, singed, written in visible ink, buried and unexhumable. Nothing could reconstruct these words, they were like a treasure lost in the depths: intimidating, undetectable” (189).

The story is a perfect metaphor for Guibert’s life and work: written in invisible ink. Perhaps, though, instead of being “unexhumable,” his work can only be understood by those who decipher its invisibility, a painful era of plague that is not entirely over and should never be forgotten.

[Joel Gallant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last year I read Guibert's "To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Live.” If you're new to his work, you'll want to start there. "Written in Invisible Ink" is a collection of his recently translated stories that range from early, almost unreadable efforts to later, more polished works. Some demonstrate his enormous talents as a writer without being particularly likeable. But then, I get the feeling Guibert wasn't very likeable himself.

[Ashe Parra · Rating 3 out of 5]

the beginning of this book was so vivid. a really beautiful, fresh, torrent of sex meshed with that typical sort of vulnerability and grittiness that i love dearly about hervé’s mind. for me — it started to lose steam around vice. the pieces following it, just didn’t seem to belong. with a different arrangement, some of these pieces would have more room to shine.

[Michael Wichita]

I enjoyed Waiting For Vincent much more. Still glad to have read this sampling of his work.

[Dan Bourke · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed selection of short stories pulled from larger bodies of work. While I loved some sections, I struggled through others.