First published by Gallimard in 1990, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life describes, with devastating, darkly comic clarity, its narrator's experience of being diagnosed with AIDS.
Anonymity comes for us all soon enough, but it has encroached with mystifying speed upon the French writer Hervé Guibert, who died at 36 in 1991. His work has been strangely neglected in the Anglophone world, never mind its innovation and historical importance, its breathtaking indiscretion, tenderness and gore. How can an artist so original, so thrillingly indifferent to convention and the tyranny of good taste — let alone one so prescient — remain untranslated and unread? ... Whatever his subject, he possessed an aloof, silvery style — a cool envelope for the hot material. Flinch, cringe, weep, laugh at his books; only indifference seems impossible ... His candor can be so extreme as to feel like provocation, and his love of provocation can tip into outré pornography. Even he could be disturbed by his brutal scenarios ... How free is a writer? And how ought we use our freedom? This is the pulsing question in Guibert’s work ... he hurtles toward all he finds frightening, anatomizing and eroticizing his terror and disgust. There can be something showy in his systematic attack on various taboos, but his inquiry is never flippant and never boring. There is a strangeness to his sentences, in their coil and snap, that gives the prose a freshness and ease. He seemed to write with enviable effortlessness. His drafts...contain few corrections or evidence of hesitation. He simply seemed to pour out onto the page ... The book is a homage to a friendship as well as a record of its gaudy betrayal. Guibert revealed to readers that Foucault did not die of cancer, per the public record, but of AIDS-related complications. He aired his friend’s laundry with ruthless efficiency ... The breach of trust still disturbs me, even as I think I understand Guibert’s brand of logic — for him, it was a commitment to a higher truth.
Although [Guibert's] narcissism may give an antic energy to his prose, fortunately it does not hood his observing eye. His characters are very real indeed and his betrayals as succulent as those Genet promises but seldom delivers ... One of the successful aspects of this book is the portrait of Foucault – something new for Guibert, the observation of someone outside the orbit of his obsessions. The worst part is the recital of grudges, the settling of scores – against Adjani, because she lets her whims interfere with his chance to earn some badly-needed money, and especially against Bill, the friend who did not save his life ... The scandal caused by Guibert’s novel apparently convinced the American drug company in question not to conduct a trial for the Salk vaccine in France, which was judged to be too disputatious a nation.
In his 1992 review of the book, the novelist and critic Gary Indiana observes, “The fact that people are terrible, frail, solipsistic, fickle, and even capable of playing God with their best friends’ lives is not exactly news to a writer.” There is every strain of weakness and deficiency in the one hundred vignettes that make up To the Friend. ... Duty seems alien to Guibert. Fantasies of treachery tint most of the relationships depicted in his stories yet the passages in To the Friend that feature Muzil gesture toward an ideal of accountability ... In AIDS narratives and diaries, self-documentation functions less to record the singularity of the individual, and Guibert’s writing consistently demonstrates his own entanglement with others ... Guibert’s writing has always understood the narrative weight of secrets, but in To the Friend, he uncovers the limits to concealment and disclosure. He poses a scenario in which the writer cannot simply devise one last reveal to forestall the end. 'Obviously the writer must die writing?' The question comes from Guibert’s diary, amidst other entries contemporaneous with the composition of To the Friend. There is no redemption for the author. The last chapter is harrowing. His body has become as thin as it was when he was a child, he warns. His style, which has been immodestly ornate throughout the novel, approaches dismal restraint. 'My book is closing in on me,' Guibert writes. Perhaps, the friend addressed in the title was the book itself, all along.
