To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

by Hervé Guibert

Book Overview

Winner of the 1992 Gregory Kolovakos Award for AIDS Writing. ?An insightful, quirky, alternately humorous and distraught account of how AIDS affects friendships...The painful, ironic record of a young man's reckoning with the disease that becomes his closest companion.??New York Times Book Review ?Some of the most powerful, affectingly unsentimental AIDS writing I?ve ever read.??Tim Dean, City Paper, Baltimore

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852423285
• ISBN13: 9781852423285
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Length: 245 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Reminiscent of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year

"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."--© zebraz

A brilliant narrative of courage and transformation.

Guibert's autobiographical novel is in a class of its own in handling the frightening reality of aids in the late 80s from the perspective a young celebrity, himself, who witnesses the loss of his famous friend (Michel Foucault in real life), and then his own sense of being. But along with the suspense there is also disarming honesty, courage, and humor. Despite the praise it received, too many people have missed the experience of this book. And amazingly almost no one has read its sequel, a lesser work technically--understandably because it was written in his last months--a dazzingly farewell called The Compassion Protocol.