Synopsis
A writer suffering from AIDS is given an experimental drug which temporarily puts his disease into remission
Reviews
No longer able to tolerate the drug AZT, former Le Monde journalist Guibert ( To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life ) was accorded a reprieve from imminent death by the experimental drug DDI, which enabled him to record his experience of dying from AIDS on paper and film. Except for occasional flashes of wry humor, he notes with amazing detachment the almost constant pain, depression and humiliation inflicted on him by his weakened body, reduced to "a kind of skeleton draped with a few rare rags of muscle." Along with noting harrowing tests and treatments, this journal-like account, in a fine, idiomatic translation, vividly portrays lovers, doctors and other AIDS victims--"young corpses with burning eyes." Prematurely aged by his disease, all sexual activity quelled, Guibert's curiosity and appreciation of life are intensified, as seen in his reaction to the charms of a woman doctor or in his observations on the predatory nature of insects. Most of all, Guibert declares, "It's when I'm writing that I feel most alive." He died in 1991, aged 36.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (LJ 7/91) confronts his own mortality with disturbing candor and biting humor in these journal entries. His friend Jules steals some valuable packets of DDI, an experimental AIDS drug, from a dead dancer, so that Guibert can begin the treatment before Dr. Chandi officially announces the "compassion protocol" (patients are usually given DDI only in the final stages of their illness, an approach doctors call "the compassion protocol"). "It's when I'm writing that I feel most alive," comments Guibert as he assiduously documents his trip to Casablanca; his flirtatious relationship with his young doctor, Claudette Dumoucel; visits to the masseur; the moments of happiness that punctuate his increasing exhaustion, weight loss, and the impression that his body, like that of his crippled Aunt Suzanne, is 95 years old. Ending on July 13, 1991 as he begins to shoot his first film, the book is powerfully augmented by the knowledge that Guibert died in December 1991 at age 36. For most collections.
James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"I have the feeling I've created a work both barbarous and delicate," Guibert says of this searingly beautiful chronicle of his final days fighting AIDS. Brutal, joyous, and tender, the journal recounts torturous tests, periods of agonizing pain and despair, the ecstasy of staring down death by daring to live, and redemption through writing. Guibert takes us along on a trip to the brink of hopelessness that eventuates in the transcendence of the human spirit. On the way, he chronicles his plummeting weight and T-cell count and his desperate attempts to secure DDI, which provides remission from his symptoms, and he muses, "My father had wanted me to do medicine." This is an almost unbelievably moving and grueling book, not for the faint of heart or stomach but immeasurably heartening, arguably destined to become a classic that extends the reaches of AIDS literature. Whitney Scott
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