1. Forget Susan Sontag’s dictum that diseases shouldn’t have meanings. Guibert inhabited AIDS as though it were a darkroom or an astronomical observatory, a means for deciphering the patterns in life’s dying light.
2. Perhaps it’s this mischievous affirmation of life’s mess and sensuality, even in the face of death, that will define Guibert’s contribution to the literature of illness. Rejecting its taboos, he scaled AIDS’ very long flight of steps and fearlessly recorded what he saw on the climb.
That last line is inspired!
Postscript: Another excellent essay on Guilbert is Wayne Koestenbaum’s “The Pleasure of the Text” (Bookforum, June/July/August, 2014; retitled “On Futility, Holes, and Hervé Guibert,” in Koestenbaum’s recent Figuring It Out). Koestenbaum says,
Futility and botched execution are the immortal matter of Guibert’s method. Futility and botched execution—combined, in Guibert’s work, with finesse, concision, and a heavy dose of negative capability, which includes curiosity about the worst things that can befall a body—are undying aesthetic and spiritual values, worth cherishing in any literature we dare to call our own.
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