Herve Guibert: The Mausoleum of Lovers

The Mausoleum of Lovers comprises Guibert’s journals, kept from 1976–1991. Functioning as an atelier, it forecasts the writing of a novel, which does not materialize as such; the journal itself ― a mausoleum of lovers ― comes to take its place. The sensual exigencies and untempered forms of address in this epistolary work, often compared to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, use the letter and the photograph in a work that hovers between forms, in anticipation of its own disintegration.