Crazy for Vincent

"'Crazy for Vincent' begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent, a skateboarding, drug-addled, delicate 'monster' of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert's life over the span of six years. After Vincent's senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered, elevated, and emotionally eviscerated his life, working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent's fragmentary appearances in his journal, the author seeks to understand what Vincent's presence in his life had been: a passion, an erotic obsession, or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book: is it a diary, a memoir, a poem, or fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? 'Crazy for Vincent' is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself."--Back cover.