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A review by traceculture
To the Friend who Didn't Save my Life by Hervé Guibert
5.0
Fascinating. I only came across Guibert because Constance Debre mentions him in Love Me Tender.
But it's a book I want to read again and again. I'm repelled and attracted. As a pioneering AIDS narrative, it's a masterpiece but at the same time, how could he betray his friends like this? Foucault? And then write a book reprimanding, for eternity, another friend for enacting the same sin? I don't know, I'm still processing it - conflicted and enthralled. I don't know much about Guibert either - French writer, journalist, memoirist, photographer, father of roman faux - but he said somewhere it pained him to write these 'dreadful books'. Was it about truth, when everything in the early days of HIV was misleading? Or, being a photographer, was he just the unthinking camera writing baldly, as Raymond-Jean Frontain thought? I don't know but it's phenomenal, really, across these pages writ large with sex and death, a man is fighting for his life. He writes slant, he writes cold, he's indiscriminate and the book is all the more devastating for it. Guibert wrote a trilogy of AIDS novels after he himself was diagnosed in 1988, recording in hideously graphic and often indecently comic detail, the ravages of the illness on mind, body and spirit. And he is a comedian: those hypochondriacal GP visits and the cataclysmic scenes of him searching for a Portuguese church that might accept the ex-votos of his blended family. Everybody's blood and secrets get spilled. Guibert's writing is hypothermic and thrilling and indiscreet. A bona fide page turner.
But it's a book I want to read again and again. I'm repelled and attracted. As a pioneering AIDS narrative, it's a masterpiece but at the same time, how could he betray his friends like this? Foucault? And then write a book reprimanding, for eternity, another friend for enacting the same sin? I don't know, I'm still processing it - conflicted and enthralled. I don't know much about Guibert either - French writer, journalist, memoirist, photographer, father of roman faux - but he said somewhere it pained him to write these 'dreadful books'. Was it about truth, when everything in the early days of HIV was misleading? Or, being a photographer, was he just the unthinking camera writing baldly, as Raymond-Jean Frontain thought? I don't know but it's phenomenal, really, across these pages writ large with sex and death, a man is fighting for his life. He writes slant, he writes cold, he's indiscriminate and the book is all the more devastating for it. Guibert wrote a trilogy of AIDS novels after he himself was diagnosed in 1988, recording in hideously graphic and often indecently comic detail, the ravages of the illness on mind, body and spirit. And he is a comedian: those hypochondriacal GP visits and the cataclysmic scenes of him searching for a Portuguese church that might accept the ex-votos of his blended family. Everybody's blood and secrets get spilled. Guibert's writing is hypothermic and thrilling and indiscreet. A bona fide page turner.