Beautiful Review of Hervé Guibert's Journals at Lambda Literary

At Lambda Literary, Steven Cordova reviews Nightboat Books' gorgeous, startling Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976—1991 by the French poet and intellectual Hervé Guibert, translated by Nathanaël. From 1977 to 1984, Guibert spent almost every day with Foucault, Cordova notes right off, and "[i]t's tempting to over-intellectualize the work." (In)famously, Guibert "fictionalized Foucault’s AIDS-related death in To the Friend Who Did Not Save May Life (1990)." And it's just as as tempting to romanticize the work of Guibert, says Cordova, particularly because he had a beautiful face, and he wrote a lot. More:

The poet Wayne Kostenbaum [who also recently wrote about Mausoleum] has written that Roland Barthes’ books “can’t be skimmed or summarized.” It seems to me the same can be said of Guibert’s Mausoleum. I am, nevertheless, going to give it a good old college try.

In Mausoleum of Lovers Guibert addresses an array of subjects: AIDS; aging; dreams (35 entries concern dreams in the first 200 pages alone); his thoughts on whatever book he was reading (books by Musil, Isherwood, Guide, Hamsun, Bernhard…); his ideas for prospective novels—some of which he had the time to write and many more which he only hoped to; his observations on daily life in Paris, including a lot of cruising on the bus and the Metro; his travels, which afford him glimpses of gay life in places like pre-glasnost Eastern Europe. He also revisits the many leitmotifs he established in his many novels—himself, his conflicted relationship with his parents, his ambitions as a writer, his love affairs, his preoccupation with the life of the blind (which grew to include his own impending AIDS-related blindness), suicide, and the daily life of his two sick and aging great-aunts.

Shot through all these subjects is Guibert’s aesthetic, an artistic means by which he sought to empty himself, to spill the beans, all the beans, his own beans and the beans of others, and, thereby, achieve catharsis. “I empty myself slowly,” Guibert writes early on in Mausoleum. “I exploit myself.” Also overriding many of Mausoleum’s entries are Guibert’s penchant for transgressiveness, a penchant brought on in part by his admiration of Jean Genet.

There is, thus, much violence, both real and/or imagined, and much lusting after jail-bait, both real and/or imagined, in these journals. There is a good deal of drugs too. The extent to which the violence and taboo sex and drugs are real or imagined are often left up to the reader’s trust in what is, in true transgressive fashion, an unreliable narrator, a narrator who often writes to achieve a dark and hallucinatory effect—verisimilitude be damned.

But what about the humanity and wisdom? The humor? It’s best here to let Guibert to speak for himself through a few passages from Mausoleum.

Read those for yourself, and the full review, over at Lambda Literary.