In 1980s and 1990s Paris, a journalist from Libération narrates the extraordinary adventures
of Willie, Doumé, and Leibowitz. The first is a young provincial with splendid beauty who becomes
the king of the Parisian gay nightlife. The Corsican Doumé was Willie's lover and founder of the first French
homosexual liberation movement. Leibo, the narrator's married lover, is a young philosopher who starts aligned with the divine left
and ends his career in a ministry.
Willie contracts AIDS and becomes a media figure on the edge of the grotesque, and a wild and furious enemy of Doumé.
La mejor parte de los hombres is Tristan Garcia's first novel, and it strongly attracted the interest of the press
and the public from the moment of its publication. With a direct style and an approach unrelated to the popular autobiographical genres,
Garcia — who by age could not have known the years he depicts — evokes that era with surprising effectiveness and vividness.
Reviews
"With La mejor parte de los hombres, his first novel, Tristan Garcia establishes himself as the literary revelation of the year.
His story of the eighties and nineties, between the homosexual scene and the new philosophers, is a magnificent moral tale
of universal scope." — Nelly Kaprièlian.
"Garcia skillfully describes the intellectual recompositions of the past two decades: the last gasp of utopias,
the left's conversion to capitalism, the transformations of activism, the significance of fractures within
the gay community, embodied by the hatred between Dominique and William. With great courage, he takes on recent history
and offers, beyond the fate of his characters, a true novel of ideas, something very 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 make a political reading of the debates sparked by AIDS in the nineties. He knows how to novelize in an engaging way those
years we thought empty, ugly, and useless and, in a modern manner, both funny, cruel, and pathetic, he paints the portrait of
familiar characters who move us almost unintentionally." — François Ozon, Les Inrockuptibles.
"A cruel and dark lucidity. A revelation." — Christine Rousseau, Le Monde.
"An intense and rough novel like contraband alcohol." — 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 became known suddenly
with his first novel, La mejor parte de los hombres, which won the Prix de Flore (2008)
and established him as one of the most promising voices of his generation. His work — both narrative and essay —
explores themes such as identity, politics, mass culture, and the tensions between desire, fame, and media power. In addition to his literary work,
he carries out intense intellectual activity in the field of contemporary thought.
