The characters in this novel have never existed other than in the pages of this book.

If, however, the reader feels that in certain ways they resemble real persons whom he or she knows, or knows of, that is simply because other persons or characters would behave no differently under similar conditions.”

The first four chapters of this book introduce us to the main protagonists, who are Willie, Doumé, Leibo and Liz

The story is told by Liz – Elizabeth Levallois - a thirty three year old cultural journalist, who is a friend of Willie, Doume’s colleague and Leibo’s mistress. It is through her that we learn how these three characters paths cross.

We are first introduced to William Miller (Willie), born in Amiens, at nineteen he moved to Paris where, at the start of the book, he is living on the streets & in the squats of the Gare Du Nord region with the idea of being an artist, although his idea of artist is mixed up with the idea of being an outlaw.

“He’d call himself an artist, meaning an outlaw. He’d say he was writing some piece, he’d say he had works in progress, shit going on. A kind of installation, like the performance artists he came across in squats. My guess is he wanted to shout words while some rockers did their thing. But there were no rockers anymore. He was living out a mythology he never quite got the hang of. He wanted tattoos, a band, a look like those pictures of James Dean or Tupac..”

This is how Liz first meets Willie, as she is there to profile him. The time is the 1980’s and she’s at the start of her career, working for an underground arts magazine. Through her Willie meets Doumé (Dominique Rossi), who Liz describes as “handsome in a mature way, responsible and lightly chiselled by time. The trouble was, when he was twenty it didn’t suit him. He had to wait to look his age.” Originally from Corsica he was a journalist and a founding member of a gay activist group called Stand Up, he was also one of the generation of homosexuals to experience sexual relations free of the worry of HIV/AIDS. Willie and Doumé become lovers and Liz starts an affair with Jean-Michel Leibowitz (Leibo), her old professor and a friend of Doumé.

Both Willie and Doume contract H.I.V and this destroys any love that existed between them.The story of Hate: A Romance, is an old tale of love turned bad, or in this case vicious, through the guise of politics, with the now ex-lovers taking different corners in the political fighting that arose around the problems with the rise of AIDS. Doumé advocates safe sex, protection, whilst Willie celebrates the virus as though it were a badge of honour stating that “AIDS belonged to us queers, it was our treasure,” and that those like Doumé were sucking up to the establishment, joining the forces of repression because “AIDS Saves, Condoms Kill.”

I used the word “corners” above because this is a fight, although the idea of Queensbury rules has no application here, this fight is down and dirty, and what was a passionate love has slowly corroded to become an equally passionate hate, with everything fair game, everything used no matter how personal it may once have been - it all gets bought out and displayed in public.

As the divide between these two characters becomes more extreme, so does the stance they take. Willie advocates the sharing of the virus as though a gift between two consenting couples & Doumé censures his ex lover for "crimes against humanity" for deliberately infecting people with HIV virus. Whilst this is going on we also follow Liz’s affair with Leibo and the path he takes from a leftish Jewish Intellectual to a member of the Government.

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/hate-romancetristan-garcia.html ( )

"Hate" is a 2008 publication by debutante French novelist Tristan Garcia. It deals with HIV/AIDS in the 1990s and early 2000s, and the chattering classes of French intellectuals. It won literary prizes in France, but is not really a literary novel - it reads like disposable journalism. Actually, a good deal of it is quite poorly written - but it's not really bitchy enough or "bad" enough to be camp - unfortunately.

Garcia has written a contemporary "roman a clef" in the manner of Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein." But none of his characters is Allan Bloom, and Garcia is certainly no Saul Bellow. French cultural life - with its celebrity "talking heads" - is shown to be insular, incestuous, and (ultimately) irrelevant. Is the modern French intellectual scene really this dull?

I probably would have liked the novel more if it hadn't been for the narrator, Elizabeth Lavallois. She's the recipient of other character's confessions and confidances, but herself is passive and unreflective. For a "cultural journalist," she's pretty much a cypher. Supposedly she is an advanced thinker and "intimate" of structuralists and deconstructionists. But in her personal life she acts like a doormat for the "Dominque Strauss-Kahn"-like men who dominate her life. I guess I just don't understand French women.

The other main character is a sociopathic and talentless gay male writer who becomes an advocate for "barebacking." Of course he gets his "comeuppance" by the end of the book.

There are at least half a dozen Anglophone "classics of literature" that deal with the spread of HIV/AIDS in the gay community. There may be a good Francophone novel that tackles the subject, but this isn't it. ( )

This is a fantastic and witty book if you have the stamina for jokes about chiasmus or the futility of Levinasian meta-ethics: if these are not quite in your zone then a great deal of this novel's charm will probably pass you by. And it is charming, in a beautifully abstract French manner - as much a treatise on the author's distaste for 'autofiction' as it is a fictionalised polemic about the merits of bareback sex. Anyone who has ever grown tired of half-baked discussions of postmodernism may want to laugh out loud at Tristan Garcia's merciless caricature of books constructed not of chapters but of 'fragments'; there is an exquisite moment where one of the four main characters protests that he is not a 'writer': 'I'm a motherfucking text'. It is very French; it made me laugh. Garcia himself claims to have tried to write from totally outside his own experience, completely to have suppressed the autobiographical element in fiction: who knows? He writes through the narrative view of a woman, Liz, who is possibly the least objectionable of the central cast; he writes vividly about the disintegration of relationships into mistrust and hate; and he writes uninhibitedly about the internal politics of the gay demi-monde. It is an arch exercise in pure abstraction, and it will be far from everybody's idea of fun; but it makes a pleasing diversion from more obviously worthy things - and the final epigrams about our ultimate moral and emotional residue when we die give a stature to the whole novel which is not unmoving. ( )