THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 65
Guibert treated his battle with AIDS as an instrument of self-revelation, publishing five books in the year before he died.
BOOKS
DEATH SENTENCES
Hervé Guibert in the kingdom of the sick.
BYJULIAN LUCAS
HANS GEORG BERGER
COVID-19 lockdown in April. It felt like
a time capsule from another, lonelier
epidemic: Guibert watches a video of a
recent medical procedure, struggles to
dress and shower, and discusses suicide
with his elderly aunts. On vacation in
Elba, he sips from a glass that appears
to contain a fatal dose of digitoxin.
A year earlier, Guibert had shocked
France by disclosing his diagnosis in a
penetrating and uncannily lucid auto-
biographical novel, “To the Friend Who
Did Not Save My Life.” A controver-
sial landmark of AIDS literature, the
book included a fictionalized portrait
of Michel Foucault, Guibert’s close
friend and mentor, and revealed that
his death, in 1984, had been the result
of AIDS. Notorious for betraying se-
crets, Guibert justified the trespass as
a prerogative of their shared destiny.
Soon, he would die the same way.
If Foucault never said a word about
his illness, Guibert would spend his last
year in the glare of an unusual celeb-
rity, dying of an illness that he treated
as an instrument of self-revelation. As
he wrote in “To the Friend,” AIDS would
be neither his secret nor his cause but
his muse and teacher:
I was discovering something sleek and daz-
zling in its hideousness, for though it was cer-
tainly an inexorable illness, it wasn’t immedi-
ately catastrophic, it was an illness in stages, a
very long flight of steps that led assuredly to
death, but whose every step represented a unique
apprenticeship. It was a disease that gave death
time to live and its victims time to die, time to
discover time, and in the end to discover life.
In the year between the publication
of “To the Friend” and his death, Gui-
bert completed five books: two short
novels, a hospital diary, and “The Com-
passion Protocol,” a moving account of
his brief yet transformative “resurrec-
tion” under the influence of an experi-
mental treatment. Altogether, they are
a singular contribution to the literature
A
frail young man shadowboxes
to Technotronic & MC Eric’s
“Tough.” Clothes hang loose on his un-
coöperative body, which sways with
each tentative punch. There’s nobody
else in the room, but a mannequin and
a stuffed monkey look on. Cut to a
spinning shot from the man’s perspec-
tive—a blur of paperbacks and floral car-
peting—and then a bathroom’s wreck -
age of medicine. He dissolves a tablet
in a cup and looks at himself in the
mirror. One senses that he hasn’t left
home in a long time.
I watched Hervé Guibert’s “La Pu-
deur ou l’Impudeur”—an auto-obitu-
ary filmed by the thirty-five-year-old,
AIDS-stricken writer months before his
death, in December, 1991—during the
