A paranoiac haze pervades The Gangsters, the not-quite policier penned by an early-career Hervé Guibert.

Its arresting cover image is Guibert’s own photo of his great aunts: Suzanne, the breadwinner, reaching her hand into the pocket of her trench coat as she gazes into the camera; Louise, the lapsed Carmelite nun, vulnerable and in her sister’s shadow, eyes fixed to the floor.

Ostensibly a mystery about how a gang of scammers defrauded these reclusive women, the novel frequently takes leave of this plot while retaining its atmosphere of fear and unease. Its most arresting passages are peripheral to crime, but inseparable from its corrupt ambiance.

Take, for example, Guibert’s description of a gaze shared over a woman performing a grotesque public routine:

“In the bus, a well-dressed old woman, sweaty, masticates her false teeth. Every now and then she seems to choke on them, as if to vomit them out. If she’s doing this, clearly it’s to ease some suffering. Little matter the looks people might give her, her mind’s made up, and the same goes for the embarrassment they might feel, to the point of nausea: more to the point is the lessening of the pain. Behind the woman seated opposite me grinding her teeth, is an attractive young boy. I look at him from time to time and I have the impression that his gaze, which intercepts mine and takes it in, is identical to my own, which understands the old woman’s mastication.”

Mixing identification, desire, and disgust, Guibert’s observations are unnerving, implicating the reader without respite.

Originally published by Les Éditions de minuit in 1977 when Guibert was only 22, this strange, spare novel is an early entry into an autofictional body of work that includes he photo novel Suzanne and Louise (1980), Crazy for Vincent (1989), and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990).

This new edition of Iain White’s translation put out by Magic Hour Press is supplemented by an afterword by Janique Vigier who contextualizes its formal and thematic considerations within Guibert’s broader career, cut short in 1991 from complications resulting from a suicide attempt three years after his AIDS diagnosis.

The narrator of The Gangsters is plagued by an ever-increasing paranoia that the text he has written might be taken away from him. It is tragic that readers were deprived of the work Guibert might have produced in a longer life. We are lucky to have the texts that exist and independent publishers willing to introduce them to new generations of readers.

The Gangsters by Hervé Guibert, Magic Hour Press edition.

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Leonor Grave

Leonor Grave is a bookseller and English buyer at Albertine Books. Prior to joining Albertine, she worked in the marketing department at the Dalkey Archive Press/Deep Vellum. Born in Lisbon, she studied English and French literature at the College of William & Mary and also works as a literary translator from Portuguese. When she is not at the store she is most likely at the movies.

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