My Manservant and Me

by Guibert Hervé, Shiv Kotecha, Jeffrey Zuckerman

Genres: General Fiction; LGBT Gay

Synopsis

A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century’s most beloved French gay writers.

 

My Manservant and Me is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle his master’s finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master’s wardrobe, sleeps in his master's bed, and yet won’t let him watch variety television. My Manservant and Me reveals the rude specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and stylistic abjection. This manservant won't be going anywhere.

 

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Release date: October 25, 2022

Publisher: Nightboat Books

Print pages: 93

Sample

Fresh Hell

A foreword by

Shiv Kotecha

 

“How to last? P.C. asked a journalist one day during an interview, not out of opportunism. How to last, that is the question, since one damages oneself into one’s own work.”

—HERVÉ GUIBERT,

The Mausoleum of Lovers (1987-88)¹

The 1990 publication of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—HervéGuibert’s candid roman à clef about a fake AIDS vaccine—made the novelist, photographer, and AIDS victim both rich and famous. He gave interviews on national TV, and his toothsome blue-eyed face appeared in magazines and on affiches plastered across Paris. During the subsequent two years, Guibert made his proximity to death the subject of four more novels and a hospital diary. He also produced La Pudeur ou l’impudeur (Modesty or Immodesty), an hour-long home video in which he documents himself craning his arms into pajamas, shooting diarrhea, and play-acting a suicide attempt, as if bent on disarming and satisfying the tumescent sympathies of a liberal French middle class who had become perversely invested in watching him, their resident AIDS patient, perish in real time. In December 1991, a month before his video diary aired on the television network TF1, a botched suicide attempt and complications with the virus led to Guibert’s actual death at the age of thirty-six.

My Manservant and Me, translated into English for the first time by Jeffrey Zuckerman, is the last novel Guibert saw published in his lifetime. In it, Guibert continues to upend the expectations of his readers, and turns his sneering rictus to a future of aging and decrepitude he knew he would not live to see. Dated “Kyoto-Anchorage-Paris. January–February 2036,” the narrative outlines the violent, though occasionally kinky, relationship between a former theater director, aged eighty—who lives in a luxury residence on Paris’s rue de Varenne as heir to a “colossal fortune” but has zero friends—and the teenage boy he’s hired to care for his frail, farting body. In 1993, Edmund White praised My Manservant and Me, calling it Guibert’s “most successful invention”—in that without explicitly mentioning AIDS, Guibert told the truth about the body’s decline and the humiliation that accompanies the contractual interdependence between a patient and their caretaker.² To be exact, Guibert doesn’t offer a positive account of disability but instead uses an onslaught of slurs to make an unrelenting and derisory hellscape of terminal illness. White highlights Guibert’s desire to provoke, drawing a contrast between Guibert and his American and English contemporaries Larry Kramer and Paul Monette, whose writing about AIDS is buttressed by compassion and a commitment toward activism; and Adam Mars-Jones, ...