Cytomegalovirus - (Forms of Living) by Hervé Guibert (Paperback)

About the Book

Cytomegalovirus 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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Guibert's Cytomegalovirus stands alone. Soon after it was first published and subsequently translated into English, the text became trusted as the artful encapsulation of a particular time of AIDS... This excellent new edition clearly marks the lasting significance of Guibert's writing.---Lukas Engelmann, Research Associate, CRASSH

"In this medical humanities classic, the vulnerable yet unabashedly confrontational Hervé 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."-----João Biehl, author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment and Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

"Like Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Hervé 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

"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

About the Author

Hervé Guibert (1955-91) was a French journalist and photographer before becoming a prominent literary figure in the early 1980s. He published nearly two dozen works in his lifetime, several of which deal with HIV/AIDS.

David Caron is Professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV.

Todd Meyers is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy.

Clara Orban is Professor and Chair of French and Italian at DePaul University.