Review

Review

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.

Notes

• 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.

• p172-173 - I ws daydreaming a bit. At heart, why did I insist that I wanted to love P.? He wasn’t a bird. I had only known him for three days. He would have been more like a cat, and I was allergic to cats. This old love, which I’d given up on, had flared up again unexpectedly, after a year apart, to show him to me again, as if certain of the effect he would have on me. … I still wanted to daydream about P. but his image was disintegrating, in my hand all I had was the painful feeling that was the absence of his neck which, barely a hundred hours earlier, had sum there.