Description
Book SynopsisCytomegalovirus is a lucid and spare autobiographical narrative by Hervé 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.
Trade Review"Like Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Herve Guibert's hospitalization diary speaks with moonlit clarity about the threshold between life and death; with this heartbreaking and exemplary book Guibert has earned literary immortality." -- -Wayne Koestenbaum Distinguished Professor of English, CUNY "In this medical humanities classic, the vulnerable yet unabashedly confrontational Herve Guibert dissects the solitary hospital body that he and unknown others have become exam after exam, drug after drug, humiliation after humiliation, scream after scream. The writer's urgent will to live and poignant desire to invent relations inside and outside the hospital are nothing short of breathtaking." -- -Joao Biehl author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival "To read Guibert's journal of faltering vision is to teeter at the portal to many worlds. He stands, like Saramago, between light and darkness, right and wrong, life and death. What he sees and hears there-what he learns-is timeless. This book is a gift." -- -David France Director of How to Survive a Plague
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Respect, One Dessert Spoon at a Time David Caron Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary Afterword: Remainders Todd Meyers Translator's Note
