Hervé Guibert

Novel is the author's thinly disguised personal struggle with AIDS

A man writes of his torments: shingles, his lovers, his great-aunts and the gangsters preying on his great-aunts.

Both blind, Josette and Robert live together in the Institute - a home and school for the blind. One morning, Josette is called into the director's office where she is assailed by an odor she has never before encountered. It emanates from Taillegueur (Tiger) who the director has just hired as a masseur for the Institute. Brutal, massive, and savage, Taillegueur sets off a cycle of lust, infidelity, and revenge that culminates in a gruesome crime de passion. Like Nosferatu the Vampire and other strange films Josette and Robert enjoy, Blindsight is a tale of gothic horror. Guibert writes about the blind with virtuosity, entering their minds and bodies and "seeing" the inner and outer worlds of their confined existence. For the sighted reader this produces a strange, hallucinated sensual confusion, in which colors are sounds and sounds are objects.

Follows the adventures of the author and his 'companion', the beautiful, passionate and mysterious Jayne. She is a statuesque blonde, former swimming champion and model, who excels in the pursuit of pleasure. They wander to and from various romantic locations - Martinique, Zurich, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Mali - which all turn out to be insidiously dangerous and disease-ridden behind their picturesque travel-brochure appearances and their expensive, luxurious hotels. As the author's real life comes to the surface of the fictional fantasy, the narrative gradually takes on more sinister tones: Guibert and Jayne acquire the symptoms of a banal, persistent infection while they are in Mali ... Guibert's AIDS symptoms develop and he undergoes a terrifying new kind of brain scan at a clinic in Washington DC. Les expoits de l'auteur et sa belle compagne, Jayne, dans leurs voyages exotiques. Mais les voyages ne sont pas parfaits. Chaque endroit présente le danger et la maladie. Guibert et Jayne devient malade en Mali et Guibert apprend qu'il est atteint du sida.

30 amerikanische und europaische Erzähler auf einen Blick: Generationenvertreter, deren Haltungen zu literarischen Traditionen genauso widersprüchlich und interessant sind wie ihr Erfahrungshunger und ihre Themen es sind. Erzählungen und Romanauszüge von Lisa Alther, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, René Belletto, William Boyd, Françoise Bouillot, Peter Carey, Jean-Claude Charles, Liane Dirks, Jean Echenoz, Deborah Eisenberg, Bret Easton Ellis, Louise Erdrich, Martin Groß, Hervé Guibert, Lisbet Hiide, Christoph Klimke, David Leavitt, Adam Mars-Jones, Susan Minot, Christa Moog, Lorrie Moore, Craig Nova, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, Alina Reyes, Christa Schmidt, Irini Spanidou, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Christof Wackernagel un Tobias Wolff, die beeindrucken und dem Leser im Kopf bleiben. 30 Autoren unter 40, deren Texte zeigen, daß es sie überall auf der Welt gibt: die Besten von morgen.

"By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific. His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the minutiae of living and of death--as a quality of invention, of melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats--at the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed. This new edition includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the quotidian aspects of terminal illness"-- "Cytomegalovirus is a lucid and spare autobiographical narrative by Herve Guibert (1955-1991) of the everyday moments of his hospitalization due to complications of AIDS. In one of his last works, the acclaimed writer presents his struggle with the disease in terms that are unsentimental and deeply human"--

"'Crazy for Vincent' begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent, a skateboarding, drug-addled, delicate 'monster' of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert's life over the span of six years. After Vincent's senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered, elevated, and emotionally eviscerated his life, working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent's fragmentary appearances in his journal, the author seeks to understand what Vincent's presence in his life had been: a passion, an erotic obsession, or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book: is it a diary, a memoir, a poem, or fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? 'Crazy for Vincent' is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself."--Back cover.