Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life Reviewed at the New Yorker

Julian Lucas writes about the recent fever for Hervé Guibert at the New Yorker. "Until recently, [he] was not widely read in English," says Lucas, astoundingly (many poets have long held Guibert as an influence). Yet he goes on to sing the merits of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (forthcoming, Semiotext(e), translated by Linda Coverdale): It's "the rare book that truly deserves the epithet 'unflinching.'" More: 

…Its author may be afraid to die, but on the page his voice doesn’t crack, his hand doesn’t tremble. He suffers throughout—passed between quacks and celebrity homeopaths because of mysterious symptoms; reliving sexual encounters as nightmarish premonitions—but along with this comes an exhilarating lucidity. Guibert feels transparent, as though walking around with “denuded blood,” but the world, too, has been stripped naked, revealing charlatans and saints, startling moments of ugliness and grace.

The novel begins on the day after Christmas, 1988. Guibert has left Paris for Rome to avoid friends as he waits for the results of a blood test that will determine his eligibility for a new medicine. The reader knows how the story ends, but Guibert doesn’t, and the layering of narratives creates a maze of dread and disorientation.

The first third of the novel revolves around the death of Muzil, an alias for Michel Foucault, who died four years before Guibert received his diagnosis. Kindly and stoic, Muzil laughs on his deathbed and discreetly makes provisions for friends. But he also espouses an obsessive concern for privacy, which Guibert betrays…

Read on at the New Yorker.