Hate: A Romance by Tristan Garcia (Faber and Faber)
Hate: A Romance is an intriguing novel of ideas by Tristan Garcia, winner of the 2008 Prix de Flore for French writing by young authors. (Controversial French author Michel Houellebecq is a previous winner for his poetry collection, Le Sens du combat.)
The novel is set in a period the author has described as an “intermediary era between past and present, in a limbo of history and the news, somewhere between the 1980s and 1990s”.
Appropriately enough, it is narrated by a cultural journalist who writes in a brusque, staccato fashion that marries journalese with documentary and philosophical styles.
The novel, originally published as La Meilleure Part des hommes, is about four people: the narrator, ÂElizabeth Levallois; her lover Jean-Michel ÂLeibowitz, who is an Âacademic by profession; and her gay friends Dominique Rossi and ÂWilliam Miller.
Reading too much
The first section opens with brief Âbiographical synopses of the chief protagonists. The opening sentence states that in photos Miller “looks like a subdued little kid, well behaved and dull”. Miller is a Jewish boy from the provinces, which he left in 1989, “the year the Berlin Wall came down”.
His lover, Rossi, is from a Corsican family with secessionist inclinations. Rossi’s father, a well-to-do medical doctor, opens his doors to a separatist on the run after killing a Âcomrade. “You were wrong to kill Alain,” he tells him. “I ought to turn you in, but I’ll give you till tomorrow before I call the cops.” A few weeks later the killer is found dead and Rossi’s father “wasn’t far away when it Âhappened”.
Our narrator, Levallois, “reads too much” and reasons that favourite titles are “for people who don’t do it for a living”.
Leibowitz (Leibo for short), a philosopher, was raised in a Jewish household in which “the word Jew was never spoken”. His father, a Polish immigrant, told him “son, you have a French first name. That means you are French.” Leibo is riven by many contradictions and could broadly be regarded as “a man of the left” long after “he’d stopped being a leftist”.
Anyone who has been on a football field and has taken a penalty kick will relate to Leibo’s existential crisis expressed in these delightful sentences: “I’d think the goalie was going to dive left, so I’d better shoot to the right. But then I’d think the goalie would end up thinking that I was thinking of shooting to the right, and so I’d better shoot left. But if he thought I was going to shoot to the other side, then I’d have to shoot to the other side of the other side, precisely where he was expecting me to shoot. I’d shoot to the right —?”
Cavalier attitudes
In centuries to come, the era Levallois is writing about will be remembered most importantly for one fact: the discovery and then explosion of HIV/Aids, first in the gay scene and later in the heterosexual community (coincidentally, the first reported cases of Aids deaths were announced 30 years ago on June 5 1981). That Aids discourses have gone mainstream is a source of irritation for Miller, who thought of the epidemic as “a real opportunity. I mean it was ours, it belonged to us queers and nobody else.”
One of the more astonishing developments in the novel is the laid-back, cavalier attitudes towards HIV. In one episode an HIV-negative man asks another to infect him with the virus. Even more shockingly, Miller organises what he calls “conversion parties” — sexual orgies at which “guys who are positive get together with guys who are negative and want to be fertilised”.
One way of reading the novel is as an account of people who have lived so long on the margins that they want things to remain so and choose the most brazen way to assert this “right”. In this nihilist line of reasoning, safe sex is a way of being co-opted by the mainstream. Miller argues: “We didn’t become queer for that. We became queer because we say ‘Fuck society’, because we don’t want to collaborate —” This attitude of denialism reminds me of 1980s Zimbabwe when HIV was rapidly spreading and ravaging the Âpopulation, yet one of the street Âacronyms for Aids was “American idea to discourage sex”.
Most of the book is really about this — how Aids belongs “to us queers” and how the homosexual lifestyle is infinitely better. But it is also about the French political scene, symbolised by Leibo’s lateral journey from the left to the right. Does Garcia suggest that if you tilt towards the left enough you actually end up on the right?
Exasperating
These contradictions, the chasm between polar extremes, is what drives the novel. The author taps into the opposing energies between the goalkeeper and the striker, nihilism and purposefulness, death and life, negative and positive, to come up with, at times, a fascinating tale and anarchic episodes of reasoning. Yet at other times it feels slightly sophomorish — the way nerdish undergraduates take to, say, Karl Marx or Frantz Fanon and feel the need invoke them at every Âopportunity.
Sometimes the ideas overwhelm the narrative and, in the absence of a compelling plot and real people, made me sigh with exasperation. It is as if Garcia, author of a previous philosophical book, has forgotten that he is writing a novel and not a PhD thesis on Aids nihilism in the Paris gay scene of the 1980s. When his story loses momentum he infuses it with philosophy and rehashes some of his interesting ideas, making it feel somewhat contrived and formulaic.
For a novel that deals with Aids, the overwhelming feeling I got, surprisingly, was revulsion and horror; it was difficult to find doses of pity and compassion. When I read the last page it felt long overdue, like a well-worn joke told by a person who stutters. Everyone, cottoning on to the joke, is tittering, but the punch line is suspended between the stutterer’s lips and the audience. We want to laugh but who or what are we laughing at?
Still, Hate: A Romance remains a fascinating novel from a remarkably confident thinker and storyteller.