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Tristan Garcia
Tristan Garcia deliberately wrote about events he had not witnessed. Photograph: Agnes Gayraud
Tristan Garcia deliberately wrote about events he had not witnessed. Photograph: Agnes Gayraud

Hate: A Romance by Tristan Garcia – review

This article is more than 13 years old
An award-winning novel about the impact of Aids in 1980s Paris brilliantly captures an era of personal and political change, says Joanna Biggs

It's Paris in the late 1980s and Aids is "the new look". Freshly assembled gay activist groups are staging a "die-in" with their mouths gaffer-taped shut, "because the dead don't speak". The personal relationships of the early 1980s have suddenly become political.

Tristan Garcia's compelling first novel, Hate: A Romance, which won the Prix de Flore (previous winners include Virginie Despentes, Florian Zeller and Michel Houellebecq), follows four lives, public and private, from the rise of the Marais gay scene to the Sarkozy era. An intellectual describes his best friend's lover as an example of the "emptiness of contemporary thought"; ex-partners denounce each other on radio; no one can bring themselves to say anything nice about anyone else's hair. "Hate's important. It's the most important thing … Hate brings you to life," as one of the characters, Will, puts it.

Will has come to Paris from dull Amiens to live in squats and work on arty "projects", and is profiled by Liz, an arts journalist starting her career on an underground magazine she describes as "a pretentious piece of shit". Liz is having an affair with Jean-Michel Leibowitz, who was her philosophy professor at Sciences Po. He's a public intellectual – he never finished his thesis but is always on telly – and is now courting the establishment. Leibo's best friend is Doumé, a journalist and the founder of Stand Up, the protesting gay activist group. He's one of the last to have experienced the joie de vivre of the early 1980s as well as its fatal consequences. Liz introduces her new find, Will, to Doumé; they become inseparable. For Doumé, their relationship is a way of forgetting what's happening to his friends but Will is jealous: "he would have liked to live through what they lived through".

In France, Garcia's book cover announced it as a novel about "Paris, the Aids years", but it isn't just about being gay and having Aids. It tries to capture a moment in recent history. So while Will and Doumé are establishing Stand Up, Leibo is diagnosing the ills of the age – a too unquestioning acceptance of the latest right-thinking trend – and Liz has got a job on Libération, a proper paper, writing about the "latest thing. It leaves a funny taste in your mouth. You smell death in the life all around you, and all the while you keep waiting for something new."

Hate becomes the story once Will and Doumé break up. Leibo tells Doumé he thought Will was a "bum" and attacks him in his book; Will rebels against Doumé by advocating unprotected sex and breaking away from Stand Up; Doumé accuses his former lover of "crimes against humanity" for infecting people with HIV. They are characters not just in love with hating each other, but also with speaking up, causing trouble and making the media agree with their way of thinking.

Liz tells the story in short, spoken-seeming sentences that give Hate: A Romance a purposefully documentary feel. Garcia, who studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, has said that his novel was written against the trend for "autofiction": novels that are based on something its writer has lived through. So Garcia, born in 1981, chose to write about documented things he couldn't have experienced. Hate: A Romance has been called a roman à clef: Will is clearly based on Guillaume Dustan, the novelist (winner of the Prix de Flore) and advocate of barebacking; Doumé resembles Didier Lestrade, founder of Act Up Paris and the gay magazine Têtu. Could Leibo be based on Alain Finkielkraut, the right-leaning TV philosopher? But Garcia is more interested in imagining other people's lives than in revealing secrets. In fact he's at his best when he makes things up. There is a very funny episode when Will is called into the jobcentre to try and get him off benefits; he camply taunts the well-meaning civil servant until he resigns to get away from him.

Garcia's clever narration moves between private and public spheres: between the cosy lunch in the Bouillon Racine and the public debate at the Théâtre du Rond-Point; between Friday night at Bar Thermik and the cherry red sofa in Liz's flat, where she watches her friends insult each other on TV. The reader becomes as addicted to the unfolding drama as the narrator is. The private people behind the public personas can still just be glimpsed; Liz's way of telling the story has caused us to "know better", as she puts it – to know that the political can be more personal than it seems.

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