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Showing 1 - 9 of
9 matches in All Departments
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My Manservant and Me (Paperback)
Herv e Guibert; Translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman; Foreword by Shiv Kotecha
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R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century's
most beloved French gay writers. My Manservant and Me is a story
about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet.
Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author
of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his
manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate
gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle his
master's finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master's
wardrobe, sleeps in his master's bed, and yet won't let him watch
variety television. My Manservant and Me reveals the rude
specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and
stylistic abjection. This manservant won't be going anywhere.
With a foreword by Maggie Nelson, an introduction from Frieze
editor Andrew Durbin and afterword from Edmund White
'Unforgettable, heartbreaking' New York Times 'As much about
friendship, intimacy, and betrayal as it is about sickness. ...
Brilliant' - Dazed 'The father of autofiction, the master of
finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty.' Guardian 'As
brutal as it is elegant; shot through with a scalding and necessary
rage.' - Neil Bartlett, author, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall
'Written with urgency, clarity ... it is electrifying in its
searing honesty' - Colm Toibin 'One of the most beautiful,
haunting, and fascinating works in the French autofictional canon.
Guibert grapples with his own AIDS diagnosis, and the death of his
friend Muzil (Michel Foucault), in a dazzling piece of writing.' -
Katherine Angel After being diagnosed with AIDS, Herve 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.
By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular
literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific.
His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend
Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was
thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an
autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his
hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus
is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the
minutiae of living and of death-as a quality of invention, of
melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats-at
the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed. This new edition
includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's
work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the
contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the
quotidian aspects of terminal illness.
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Ghost Image (Paperback)
Herv e Guibert
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R466
R404
Discovery Miles 4 040
Save R62 (13%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Ghost Image is made up of sixty-three short essays - meditations,
memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems - and not
a single image. Herve Guibert's brief, literary rumination on
photography was written in response to Roland Barthes' 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.
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Crazy for Vincent (Paperback)
Herv e Guibert; Introduction by Bruce Hainley; Translated by Christine Pichini
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R378
R308
Discovery Miles 3 080
Save R70 (19%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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 Herve 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.
By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular
literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific.
His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend
Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was
thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an
autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his
hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus
is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the
minutiae of living and of death-as a quality of invention, of
melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats-at
the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed. This new edition
includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's
work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the
contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the
quotidian aspects of terminal illness.
A novel that describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its
narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. First published
by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's
experience of being diagnosed with AIDS. Guibert chronicles three
months in the penultimate year of the narrator's life as, in the
wake of his friend Muzil's death, he goes from one quack doctor to
another, describing the progression of the disease and recording
the reactions of his many friends. The novel scandalized the French
media, which quickly identified Muzil as Guibert's close friend
Michel Foucault. To the Friend became a bestseller, and Guibert a
celebrity. Guibert continued to document the daily experiences of
his body in a series of novels and diaries, mostly published
posthumously. To the Friend has since attained a cult following for
its intimate and candid tone, its fragmented and slippery form. As
Edmund White observed, "[Guibert's] very taste for the grotesque,
this compulsion to offend, finally affords him the necessary
rhetorical panache to convey the full, exhilarating horror of his
predicament." In his struggle to piece together a language suited
to his suffering, Herve Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety
and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.
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