The Gangsters

If you've ever tried to read Knut Hamsun's Hunger only to discover that it takes three months and an insane amount of willpower to get past the first 40 pages (and honestly, who hasn't? Right?), you might give Herve Guibert a try instead. Guibert is Hamsun-lite, equally dark and funny but a little less manic. Also, he writes novellas. As you may have noticed: we are all about novellas. In this one, the narrator, a not-so-fictional version of Guibert himself, is a sardonic young Parisian writer embroiled in a number of romantic intrigues with beautiful, aloof young men. His two great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise, get robbed of millions of francs by a team of shady contractors. Rather than stick around and deal with the bungling French policemen, he leaves the old ladies to fend for themselves and takes off with a lover for the coast. On the trip, he writes letters and drifts into memories of his scandalous sexual affairs. He may or may not get murdered at the end. I don't know. It is all very French. From what I've read about Guibert, he was an OG hipster, a bisexual journalist and photographer who worked at Le Monde and ran in circles with Barthes and Foucault. He writes pretty much the way you would expect, his voice a blend of morbidity, self-loathing, exceptional wit and extreme arrogance. (Sample line: "Once, at dinner my friend Philippe informed that, scientifically, suffering was such a mystery that one could almost say that it did not exist.") Also, dude was H-A-W-T, especially if you can look past the whole contracting AIDS and passing it along to his lover and his lover's wife, then committing suicide at the age of 36 bit.