In the middle of the night between the 25th and 26th of November, Vincent fell from the third floor playing parachute with a bathrobe. He drank a liter of tequila, smoked Congolese grass, snorted cocaine... -- from Mad About Vincent
Mad About 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. At turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of Guibert’s life over the span of 6 years (from 1982, when he first met Vincent as a fifteen-year-old teenager, to 1988): after his senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance mission in writing 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 country Guibert describes as having been ＂invaded＂ for the better part of a decade -- the author seeks to understand what Vincent’s presence in his life had been: A passion? A love? An erotic obsession? Or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book that results: Is it diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? Mad About Vincent is a text whose very nature is untethered as desire itself.
