Hervé Guibert – författare

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.

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, Hervé Guibert catapulted himself into notoriety and sealed his reputation for uncompromising, transgressive prose.

Tre blinda: kvinnan, mannen, älskaren. En roman om hur de möts, hur de älskar, hur de dödar varandra. Hervé Guiberts hyllade roman Blinda, från 1985, är full av häpnadsväckande fantasi och insikt. Knappast finns det skrivet något liknande om hur det är att vara blind. Genom att gestalta hur några patienter på ett blindinstitut förhåller sig till den värld som undflyr dem lyckas Guibert säga åtskilligt om hur de seende i sin tur förhåller sig till den värld som de går miste om. Romanen kan läsas som en feberdröm eller ett reportage, där färger är ljud och ljud är ting. De blindas mardrömslika fantasier kulminerar i ett fasansfullt passionsbrott.Hervé Guiberts bok Blinda har kommit att betraktas som en kultbok. Denna utgåva i Norstedts Klassiker innehåller ett nyskrivet förord av Eli Levén.