GLR May-June 2023

morphine injections. The vi sions the drug induces leave him no longer sure “whether my manservant is my son or my father.” The manservant says that when the master dies, he will go to work for his doctor, another morphine addict. In re taliation, the master pretends he does not recognize the manser vant. “When he’s at his wits’ end, he’ll finally become inter esting. He’ll lose his infuriating ordinariness.” In comparison to To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life , Guibert’s final book strikes me as slight—both in length and in importance. It seems a kind of reworking of

Publicity poster for Hans Georg Berger’s Hervé Guibert Phantom Paradise: A Photographic Love , 2019.

heritance, revealing that he has been rummaging through the master’s papers and uncovered evidence of fraud: the master has despoiled his great-grandfather’s wishes to leave every thing to the Humane Society. “Do I have it right that, as long as I’ve been with you, it’s presumably been thanks to the as sistance of some fly-by-night lawyer that a huge scam has cov ered my room and board and paid for these pointless, cockamamie trips that haven’t done me the least good?” he chides. In turn, Sir has snooped on his manservant, opening a manila envelope in which a “voyeuristic faggot” of a film di rector has offered the young man a chance to be in a film “even more mediocre than the first.” Back and forth goes the S/M dynamic. The manservant pro poses that the master withdraw seventy million francs from his accounts so that he can buy “a very nice Picasso.” When Sir re fuses to give Jim the money, the manservant reveals that he has already sold off several other very valuable paintings in the mas ter’s possession. They fight, the old man falls backwards, the servant “dredges” him up. Later, trying to make his way from the couch to the bathroom, the master falls again. Though he cries out for help, the manservant leaves him helpless all night long. “You need to know how to be on the ground and not panic,” he tells Sir. When the master threatens to fire him, the manservant calmly replies, “I won’t be fired because Sir can’t do without me anymore ... we’re stuck together to the bitter end.” The subtle persecution continues. When the manservant gives Sir his routine injection of morphine, the master no longer feels the rush. Later he discovers the young man has been steal ing the drug for himself and substituting tap water for his em ployer’s injections. “I wanted to slap him, but I couldn’t get my arm all the way up to his cheek.” Soon the master is reduced to lying on the ground, curled up like a fetus. The manservant’s cruelties further mount up: he no longer holds up the master’s head to allow him to swallow properly; he kicks him and pisses on him. “If he had pissed on me when he was fifteen, at a push I might have liked it,” the old man says. “But now it’s too late, it’s just piss that smells like snail juice and goes cold immediately.” Eventually, the manservant resumes giving the master his

Guibert’s earlier autofiction, Crazy for Vincent , about his ob session with a young, mostly straight skateboarder. Still, in the hands of Jeffrey Zuckerman, who has also translated Guibert’s collection of stories, Written in Invisible Ink , this is a com pelling, even unforgettable, if truly repugnant, reading experi ence. My Manservant and Me is Guibert’s final expression of defiance against any comfortable notions we may have about the approaching end.

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