Dennis Cooper Spotlights Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

Today at Dennis Cooper's Blog (long live Dennis Cooper's Blog), a spotlight on photographer and writer Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauve la vie). Published in French in 1990, the book is "a first-person account of a young writer’s confrontation with a range of physical, psychological and social effects of HIV, dating from 1980 to 1989." Guibert's journals, called The Mausoleum of Lovers and translated by Nathanaël, were published in 2014 by Nightboat.

Cooper excerpts from Makurrah’s Blog, where a description of the roman à clef resides, and includes a bevy of photographs taken by Guibert, who died of AIDS in 1991. In 1990, he publicly revealed his HIV status in this book, or as the description here tells it, several instances in the text lead to a convergence of author and narrator, transgressing the "fundamental law of the novelistic genre" so that they become indistinguishable.

These instances, at least six in number, prove to have two traits in common: a reference to the work itself as it is being written, and an act or event of dating that demarcates its provenance. The unsettling experience of reading these passages leads us to ask (among other things, certainly) what the co-presence of these traits inscribes in the relations between novel and autobiography, fiction and testimony.’

Also here are video clips (Guibert was also a filmmaker), links to other resources on Guibert, an interview (in French), and an excerpt from the book.

I’ve decided to be calm, to follow to the end this novelistic logic that so hypnotizes me, at the expense of all idea of survival. yes, I can write it, and that’s undoubtedly what my madness is – I care more for my book than for my life, I won’t give up my book to save my life, and that’s what’s going to be the most difficult thing to make people believe and understand.

*

When I learned I was going to die, I’d suddenly been seized with the desire to write every possible book – all the ones I hadn’t written yet, at the risk of writing them badly: a funny, nasty book, then a philosophical one – and to devour these books almost simultaneously, in the reduced amount of time available, and to write not only the books of my anticipated maturity but also, with the speed of light, the slowly ripened books of my old age.