Herve Guibert: My Manservant and Me

‘My Manservant and Me’ is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, in ‘My Manservant and Me’, we learn about the author’s live-in manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums, who’s been authorized to handle his master’s finances, who orders stock buys, dictates his master’s wardrobe, sleeps in his master’s bed, and yet won’t let him watch variety television. ‘My Manservant and Me’ reveals the rude specificities of this relationship with provocative humor and stylistic abjection. This manservant won’t be going anywhere.