To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

In an unflinching novel about life with AIDS, an imaginative and vital narrator describes the underground lifestyle of his friend, a character based on the philosopher Michel Foucault, until the narrator faces his own infection and death sentence

"I had AIDS for three months," opens this moving French bestseller, which reads like a personal memoir. Delivered with wit, verve and valor by a seasoned author and former Le Monde journalist, the novel chronicles the experiences of its bisexual protagonist and narrator, a writer/newsman to whom the author gives his own name and who at 30 is so fair and cherubic that hookers in Mexico offer themselves gratis. Empathetic and informative about AIDS, packed with medical information, the account miraculously avoids sounding lugubrious. Instead it absorbs the reader in physical details of protagonist Guibert's illness and daily routines (e.g., the constant drawing of blood samples), and of his mood swings upon learning he is "seropositive." Metaphors for the disease include bullfighting, colonization, a game of Pac Man. Fearing he may crave a swift death, Guibert amasses a suicidal dose of a heart drug. Others who are doomed, both gays and straights, offer one another comradely support, even as they rally around another dying friend, a famous author named Muzil (a character based on French philosopher Michel Foucault). The false "friend" of the title is the manipulative manager of a pharmaceutical lab, who feigns sympathy, dangles hope of a pioneering vaccine and gloats that he is not infected. Even those who might hesitate at reading a book on this tragic subject will respond to Guibert's intelligent, humane tale.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An AIDS victim's impassioned refusal to go gently into that good night is the theme of this moving and often searing novel by French writer and journalist Guibert. In a series of diary-like chapters, reminiscent of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, the narrator, a homosexual writer in his early 30s, records his own first response to AIDS, as well as the way the disease insidiously begins to affect a whole community. He notes how friendships, families, and affections are tested, and sometimes--though rarely--found wanting. And he recalls how he watched an old and close friend, Muzil, die--a character based apparently on the renowned French philosopher Foucault--but thought himself immune. Finally, suspecting that he is infected, he reluctantly goes along with an old friend, Jules, a bisexual and father of two young children, to be tested. But when ``this certainty became official, even though it remained anonymous, it became intolerable.'' For a brief moment, when his blood count improves, he believes he'll survive, but then he worsens and plans his suicide. Meanwhile, despite his urgent appeals for AZT from a friend, Bill, who works for a drug company, Bill delays until it's too late. Bill, unlike his other friends, is too frightened to be a hero: ``The hero is the one helping someone who is dying, the hero is you, and maybe me as well, the one who's dying.'' He ends close to death--``my arms and legs once again as slender as they were when I was a child.'' As much as it's a story of one man, this is a novel of historic record in which not just AIDS but death itself becomes the enemy to be fought, denied even, but never defeated--no matter how strong the will or spirit. A relentlessly honest, extraordinarily truthful book. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Even fictionalized AIDS can rivet, and this novel does not disappoint. The narrator, a bisexual also named Herve Guibert, is friends with the gay intellectual Muzil, based on the French structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault. Guibert realizes that he has AIDS when his symptoms resemble those afflicting the ailing Muzil after his return from the San Francisco bathhouses. Guibert naturally jumps to conclusions when his friend Bill, manager of a pharmaceutical laboratory, expresses hope for a vaccine. When that hope fizzles, Guibert's response recalls the philosophical parallel he has drawn between the mind of the terminally ill and the celestial black holes that paradoxically survive by eating into themselves. Written in the form of a random journal, this work offers both convincing medical descriptions and probing personal analysis. Recommended for a wide range of readers.
- Kenneth Mintz, formerly with Bayonne P.L., N.J.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.