Hate: a Romance

Tristan Garcia's debut novel is very, very good. It's funny and cruel and tender and smart and appalled and elegiac and heartbreaking. It's a cracking story that asks important questions without offering answers, and does so by letting you pleasurably inhabit other peoples' worlds for the space of an afternoon.

Garcia reconstructs the world of Paris in the eighties, through the eyes of a cultural journalist who watches her group of friends and lovers be torn apart by AIDS, politics, moral and intellectual conflict, by jealousy and failed romances and hatred. There is Leibo, the brilliant young philosopher whose courting of the establishment moves him ever rightward: Doumé, the gentle Corsican who becomes an impassioned gay rights activist as AIDS begins to decimate his community; Will, a cracked dilettante whose personal beauty is matched only by his talent for public provocation; and, observing it all with love and dismay, the narrator, Elizabeth, whose interventions in this disparate group can never prevent the inevitable catastrophe.

Hate: A Romance has attracted some attention in France for its parallels with a real-life feud which split 1980s intellectual Paris. Perhaps this is a measure of just how successful Garcia is in reconstructing an era which is both strange and familiar.