MY MANSERVANT AND ME

“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.