Guibert is the consummate poet of obsession: the way it unravels the self, and gives it substance, too.
“I never imagined that my manservant might like me": So begins the late French writer Guibert's darkly humorous short novel.
The narrator is an ailing octogenarian, a man of means cushioned by his great-grandfather’s “colossal fortune.” In his youth he attempted to forge a career as a playwright, but his efforts never yielded “a true work of art.” “Maybe someday I’ll make something that will hold up if I’m able to simply describe the relationship binding me to my manservant,” he says ruefully. His first-person chronicle of their turbulent relationship, furtively scrawled in a notebook in his manservant’s absence, furnishes this book with its narrative. The manservant, Jim, is a “lazy young man,” a luckless actor who’s struggled to find success after a leading role in a serviceable film. And so he insinuates himself into a drama of Sade-an proportions. Cast opposite the narrator, he plays his role with a frightening, self-abnegating obsession to the lurid, bitter end. In their battle of wills, the manservant wields a manipulative force unlike any the narrator could’ve imagined for the inchoate characters that passed through his plays. He refuses the subservience prescribed by his title, usurping his master’s life with a slew of deranged tactics: He bullies his staff, commandeers his finances, siphons off his wealth. “My manservant wants to take care of everything himself,” says the narrator flatly. Jim’s contempt for his master grows increasingly explicit, even violent, as the novel progresses. The narrator records this humiliation with sobering lucidity: “He never looks at my emaciated body, it’s as if I don’t have one, his eyes might pass over it but they never land on anything, they slide right past, like an ectoplasm.” Yet nothing can displace their need for each other; their debasing codependency makes them appear “as if we were a single person now doubled.” It’s material well suited for a Fassbinder film. The novel was published in France in 1991, the year Guibert died of AIDS. His final years were marked by a bleak isolation akin to the one that engulfs the narrator. The narrator is, in James Schuyler’s phrase, a “victim of the other side of love.” And as his manservant reminds him, “Creatures need love, too, Sir.”
Guibert is the consummate poet of obsession: the way it unravels the self, and gives it substance, too.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64362-152-4
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Nightboat Books
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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