Crazy for Vincent
Author(s): Herve Guibert
In the middle of the night between the 25th and 26th of November, Vincent fell from the third floor playing parachute with a bathrobe. He drank a liter of tequila, smoked Congolese grass, snorted cocaine...-- from Crazy for Vincent Crazy for Vincent begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent, a skateboarding, drug-addled, delicate "monster" of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Herve Guibert's life over the span of six years (from 1982, when he first met Vincent as a fifteen-year-old teenager, to 1988). After Vincent's senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered, elevated, and emotionally eviscerated his life, working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent's fragmentary appearances in his journal, the author seeks to understand what Vincent's presence in his life had been: a passion? a love? an erotic obsession? or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book that results: Is it diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? Crazy for Vincent is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself.
General Information
- :
- : Semiotexte/Smart Art
- : 0.113
- : 01 March 2017
- : United States
- : books
Other Specifications
- : Herve Guibert
- : Paperback
- : 0317
- : English
- : 155.937
- : 96
- : 1 b&w illus.
More About The Product
Herve Guibert was the author of more than twenty-five books, many of which redefined the genres of fiction, criticism, autobiography, and memoir. A photography critic for Le Monde from 1977 to 1985, he was also a photographer and filmmaker in his own right, and in 1980 published the photo-novel Suzanne and Louise, a book that combined photographic studies of his great-aunts with stories about them. In 1984 he was awarded a Cesar for best screenplay in partnership with Patrice Chereau for L'Homme Blesse. Shortly before his death, he completed La Pudeur ou L'impudeur, a video work that chronicles the last days of his life while living with AIDS. He died in 1991, at the age of 36. Bruce Hainley lives and works in Los Angeles. A contributing editor at Artforum, he is the author of two books of poetry, one of which, Foul Mouth, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series. With John Waters, he wrote Art -- A Sex Book. He teaches in the MFA programs of Art Center College of Design and the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California.
