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Rating: 
Summary: Bilge and Bricolage
Review: Sarkonak obviously loves his subject and possesses a well of knowledge regarding it, but this book makes for terrible reading. Not really a biography, not really an academic critique, the book wanders willy-nilly over the life of Guibert, sensationalizing it throughout and never producing anything but the most banal of theses (such as, for example, that Guibert attempted to redefine "family"). I, for one, love gossip and sensationalism as much as the next person (perhaps even more), but Sarkonak crowds out the details with embarrassingly terrible explication. One would expect that a writer who includes Foucault and Barthes in his narrative would have read them closely, but there's no idication here that Sarkonak has more than a shallow familiarity with their works. How, for example, could someone familiar with Foucault even imagine suggesting that homosexuality is a genetic trait? Just as deplorable, Barthes' admittedly sloppy "punctum" gets dragged all over Sarkonak's text till it resembles pure schlock. All that said, I have to confess that I'm glad this book exists. There's so little in English about Guibert that this book fills an important space for the English reader/thinker. It's also painstakingly documented and full of (perhaps even overburdened by) quotations in the original French. Also, Sarkonak's readings of Guibert's photographs are interesting and suggestive, if often off-the-mark.
Rating:
Summary: Bilge and Bricolage
Review: Sarkonak obviously loves his subject and possesses a well of knowledge regarding it, but this book makes for terrible reading. Not really a biography, not really an academic critique, the book wanders willy-nilly over the life of Guibert, sensationalizing it throughout and never producing anything but the most banal of theses (such as, for example, that Guibert attempted to redefine "family"). I, for one, love gossip and sensationalism as much as the next person (perhaps even more), but Sarkonak crowds out the details with embarrassingly terrible explication. One would expect that a writer who includes Foucault and Barthes in his narrative would have read them closely, but there's no idication here that Sarkonak has more than a shallow familiarity with their works. How, for example, could someone familiar with Foucault even imagine suggesting that homosexuality is a genetic trait? Just as deplorable, Barthes' admittedly sloppy "punctum" gets dragged all over Sarkonak's text till it resembles pure schlock. All that said, I have to confess that I'm glad this book exists. There's so little in English about Guibert that this book fills an important space for the English reader/thinker. It's also painstakingly documented and full of (perhaps even overburdened by) quotations in the original French. Also, Sarkonak's readings of Guibert's photographs are interesting and suggestive, if often off-the-mark.
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