HerveGuibert

Another Guibert. I expected this one to speak a little more to me, as it is the intersection of photography and writing. Little parts of it, especially the brief entry “Contact Sheet” (see note for p75 below) did, and others were worth reading, but maybe had quieter voices. The premise of using words as a method of constituting photographs (the ghost images) in the reader’s mind is interesting; it is what all fiction writing at the least is, of a sort. Stephen King calls writing telepathy. Sometimes the writer strings words together that are outlandish and have nothing to do with anything else, purely because the stringing of them evokes a certain emotion or sensory experience. Other times it is visual description to the nth degree, forcing the image the writer beholds into the reader’s mind (willingly or not). Guibert falls somewhere in the middle. Some of the photographs and paintings referenced speak more to me in Guibert’s words than they do on a computer screen, and some of his words I badly wish I could see printed as a photo. At some point soon I will mindfully go through his photobook The Only Face and I’m curious if I will discover any of these spoken photos in those pages. ...

Rather difficult to “review” journals. What’s the reader to evaluate, the prose? How interesting the trivia? I don’t typically read Goodreads reviews before I write my thoughts, but I felt pretty sure that mine wouldn’t change much. I read a few lamentations, Oh, Hervé needed an editor. I do not want journals to be heavily edited. I think that ruins them. Sure, maybe a few typo corrections or whatever, but to have entries removed by someone else veers into making judgement about what is important and what is not. Two people are empowered to make that decision, the journalist and the reader, especially with a posthumous publication. Especially with a writer so known for being ‘merciless’ and so willing to be pornographic in his work. I would like the thing warts and all. ...

I became aware of Guibert via Philippe Besson’s Lie With Me, and so picked up Written in Invisible Ink, a collection of short stories which I had mixed feelings about but generally liked. Crazy for Vincent has been on my saved titles list on ThriftBooks for quite a while and I finally found a copy. It’s a short little diary, told reverse-chronologically, of Hervé’s love for Vincent. It begins in 1989 at the end of November, with Vincent’s death. I often forgot that we are moving back through time, through the period of Hervé’s knowing of and love for (obsession with?) Vincent. In a way it is fitting that we start with Vincent’s death, because we have no sense of the book-Hervé’s continued life afterwards, it is as if he, too, died. ...

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. ...