In Paris during the eighties and nineties, a journalist from Liberation It narrates the extraordinary adventures of Willie, Doumé, and Leibowitz. The first is a strikingly handsome young man from the provinces who becomes the king of Parisian gay nightlife. The Corsican Doumé was Willie's lover and the founder of the first French homosexual liberation movement. Leibo, the narrator's married lover, is a young philosopher who begins his career in the left wing of the Church and culminates in a government ministry.
Willie contracts AIDS and becomes a media figure bordering on the grotesque, and a savage and unbridled enemy of Doumé.
The best part about men It is Tristan Garcia's first novel, and it attracted considerable interest from the press and the public from the moment of its publication. With a direct style and an approach distinct from the autobiographical genres then in vogue, Garcia—who, due to his age, could not have lived through the years he portrays—evokes that era with surprising effectiveness and vividness.
Reviews
"With The best part about menWith his debut novel, Tristan Garcia has established himself as the literary revelation of the year. His story, set in the eighties and nineties amidst the gay scene and the new philosophers, is a magnificent moral tale of universal scope. Nelly Kaprièlian.
“Garcia skillfully depicts the intellectual realignments of the past two decades: the last gasp of utopias, the left’s conversion to capitalism, the transformations of activism, the significance of the fractures within the gay community, embodied by the hatred between Dominique and William. With great courage, he seizes upon recent history and offers, beyond the fate of his characters, a genuine novel of ideas, something quite rare in French literature.” Jean Hurin, Le Magazine littéraire.
"In France, writers rarely venture into the territory of contemporary history. Tristan Garcia is not afraid to offer a political reading of the debates sparked by AIDS in the 1990s. He knows how to novelize in a stimulating way those years that we thought were empty, ugly, and useless, and, in a modern, at once funny, cruel, and pathetic manner, he paints a portrait of familiar characters that move us almost involuntarily." François Ozon, Les Inrockuptibles.
"A cruel and dark lucidity. A revelation." Christine Rousseau, Le Monde.
"An intense and harsh novel, like bootleg liquor." Claude Arnaud, Le Point.
"The birth of a true writer." Dominique Fernandez, Le Nouvel Observateur.
About the author
Tristan Garcia (Toulouse, 1981) is a French writer and philosopher. He rose to fame with his first novel, The best part about men, who obtained the Flore Prize (2008) and established him as one of the most promising voices of his generation. His work—both fiction and essays—explores themes such as identity, politics, mass culture, and the tensions between desire, fame, and media power. In addition to his literary work, he maintains an active intellectual presence in the field of contemporary thought.
