Hervé Guibert wrote “Gangsters” when he was already ill with an incurable disease. He never mentions her, but the narrative is filled with the fear of death. A critic for the newspaper Le Monde called this book a “treatise on pain.”

The hero of “Gangsters” suffers from an illness that is considered one of the most unbearable and destroys the boundaries between physical pain and mental pain. He tells - and we seem to see it with our own eyes - about the development of an unquenchable itch, an all-encompassing burning sensation and the approach of paroxysm.

Le Monde

Some of our contemporaries will become classics. We often make short-term mistakes and don't know who won. But as for Hervé Guibert, he is seen in the future as big as a house, huge as the sun...