Hervé Guibert: The Gangsters

Hervé Guibert’s novel The Gangsters opens at the front door of a Paris townhouse inhabited by the narrator’s elderly great-aunts, Suzanne and Louise. The narrator, distracted by a health crisis and his pursuit of an ambivalent lover, arrives to find suspicious renovation work taking place. But even after the great-aunts confess to being intimidated and extorted, neither he nor the incompetent police can stop the ongoing larceny. Readers of Guibert’s writing may already recognize the narrator (also named Hervé) and his great-aunts from the groundbreaking photo-novel Suzanne and Louise (1980). Like his other books, The Gangsters is a work of autofiction. Here, he uses the crime-novel format to explore universal motifs, such as cruelty, desire and mortality. “When I disappear,” Guibert continued, “I will have said it all. I will have striven to reduce this distance between the truths of experience and writing.” Originally published in 1988, The Gangsters was his first book to be translated into English. This new edition from Magic Hour features Iain White’s original translation and a new afterword by the writer Janique Vigier.