My manservant and me

The late novelist and AIDS provocateur-activist Guibert (To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life) offers an exquisite narrative of submissive seduction, sadistic subjugation, and psychological manipulation involving an elderly playwright and his young caregiver. Guibert (1955--1991) sets the novel in 2036 and subtly unravels the men's seesawing, often violent, kinky bonds. Hired to handle all the affairs of the "cynical dandy," including a "colossal fortune" and the administration of morphine injections, 20-year-old Jim, a former child actor, usurps control of his master's wardrobe, determines television viewing habits, and alters Regency-era furniture in the main bedroom of their Rue de Varenne mansion. Funds are frittered away on a Christmas sex holiday in Bangkok. Sir, as the 80-year-old playwright is known, meanwhile subsists on microwave meals, beer, and aquavit, and feels uneasy with his complicity in the "structure of servitude"--Budapesti tavern servers, Moroccan bellhops, La Coupole waiters, Jim--and asks himself, "Does this mean I like to enslave others?" Guibert's unflinching descriptions and unfettered prose put him in a prominent place on the gay fiction continuum, somewhere between J.R. Ackerley and Garth Greenwell. Thanks to Zuckerman's sumptuous translation, Anglophone readers can enjoy this captivating firecracker. (Oct.)

"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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

I never imagined that my manservant might like me. In fact, I thought, upon making him my manservant, that he would hate me. He was a lazy young man who, by chance, had snagged the leading role in a film and whom no director had contacted since. How unwise it proved for me to decide, that afternoon, to go see a movie at the theater. First I'd thought about hiring, since neither my secretary nor my steward could take on such a role, and since I was farting more and more violently at those high-society soirées that I barely ever went to anymore, some elegant young man who would follow my footsteps in public, but act as if he didn't know me, like a magician's assistant, doing his best to blush, to cough, to discreetly apologize instead of me every time I let out one of those machine-gun gusts. I'd imagined that whenever I brought this young man to a restaurant to keep me company after his workday, that by silent agreement we'd have decided that he would, without fail, insist to the maître d' that he wasn't the least bit hungry, and that with the tip of my lips, as if I didn't want to burn myself, I would nibble at the glaze on an especially heavy dish, which I would then slide across the table toward my underling, who would wolf it down greedily. Unfortunately, nothing went as expected. And then I'd been keen on some Pakistani steward who wouldn't speak French, and therefore wouldn't understand a thing when I was on the phone. I'd been set on keeping what remained of my personal life discreet; the help is so quick to gossip with neighbors and storekeepers. But I don't have many people to talk to anymore, much less anyone to keep from understanding me. All my real friends have died, the last one less than two weeks ago. The narrators of Russian novels have manservants who sleep like dogs in drafty antechambers, sharpen their foils for dueling, and wear their old overcoats. They're failures, often counterparts to their masters, and could have stood in their stead had some accident of birth or some setback, some lady, sheer fate, not relegated them to this rank. They've been worn down into servility, all their being exudes something rancid. They work without any love, any attentiveness, not even waxing their masters' boots can spark their enthusiasm. My own manservant was a killer lying in wait; that was why I'd chosen him. I was a man  in decline . I needed a true bodyguard, someone who would pull me upright when I fell, get me dressed, massage my legs when they were so swollen that I couldn't feel them anymore. My manservant was the polar opposite of the usual Russian manservant: he carried out the least obligation with zeal, as if this act, in this case getting me out of my bathtub, was of the most vital interest to him. Maybe it was the fervor of hatred that drove him; there was no way for me to know at that point. Excerpted from My Manservant and Me by Hervé Guibert All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.