Hate: A Romance
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
In a controversial first novel that took the French literary world by storm and won the Prix de Flore, Tristan Garcia uses sex, friendships and love affairs to show what happens to people when political ideals - Marxism, gay rights, sexual liberation, nationalism - come to an end. As Elizabeth Levallois, a cultural journalist, looks back on the decade and on the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in Paris, a drama unfolds - one in which love turns to hate and fidelity turns to betrayal, in both affairs of the heart and politics.
With great verve and ingenuity, Garcia lays claim to an era that promised freedom as never before, and he paints an indelible, sharp, but sympathetic portrait of intellectuals lost in the age of MTV.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spinning out the tale of her relationships with three men in Paris from the 1980s to the present, Liz, the narrator of this disappointingly flat import, largely lets life happen around her as her friends and lovers have spectacular highs and lows. While the Liz's men friends embark on interesting lives the HIV-positive Willie becomes an outspoken proponent of unprotected sex and finds himself a countercultural icon of sorts, while Doum , Willie's ex and a proponent of safe sex as "the public face" of a gay-rights organization, rails against him she watches the drama and sometimes takes a bit of abuse. Her tepid affair with married intellectual Liebo seems to keep her content, but, of course, the situation isn't exactly ideal for her or for him. Garcia's story is certainly not lacking in drama, or thanks to flamboyant Willie histrionics, but despite a fluid translation, there's very little to inspire interest in or empathy for characters as passive as Liz or singularly self-obsessed as the others.
