*Arthur's Whims by Herve Guibert (Spurl, 2021, originally published in 1983)

 

I haven't read anything else by Herve Guibert, but I've know about him because I've had his book To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which was a very early book about AIDS (Guibert died of AIDS in 1991, at the age of. 36) on my shelf since it was originally published in 1990.

Arthur's Whims is a kind of James-Purdian fable set in a fantastic world that is both magical and menacing.  Arthur and his young protege and lover, Bichon, travel around the world in various incarnations -- bird trappers, magicians, religious charlatans -- encountering dark sexual perversions and erotic violence.  The writing (in Daniel Lupo's poetic translation) is sumptuously beautiful, and reading the short hallucinatory chapters is as pleasurable as devouring a box of French bonbons.

There is an increasing and disturbing flowing of blood as the book progresses, which I attributed to the nightmarish early (and late) days of the epidemic, when one's own blood and body fluids seemed potentially lethal.  And so I was surprised to learn that this book was first published in 1983, and written even before then when Guibert would not have known about AIDS and his medical situation.  It seems as if in this case art eerily prefigured life (and death), as it often seems to do.