To Write as If Already Dead and To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life
In which I write about one book I haven't read and one book I have.
If you’ve known me for a while, you’ll know that I love Kate Zambreno’s books, starting with Green Girl and Heroines (both of which I plan to reread), on through Screen Tests, Book of Mutter, Appendix Project, and Drifts (actually I want to reread all her books). The only one I haven’t read is O Fallen Angel, her first, and I will get there.
She has a new book coming out this June called To Write as If Already Dead, which I have been thinking of as a book about the French writer Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (translated by Linda Coverdale). I know it’s not a straightforward study – not a book of literary criticism – but I have thought of it as a personal response to the book, sort of memoir and criticism combined. But the publisher copy says this:
To Write as if Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life.
This makes me think of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage, a book about Dyer’s failed attempts to write a book about D.H. Lawrence. I loved Out of Sheer Rage, and I would love to read Zambreno’s take on the “writing about the thing one is not writing about” subgenre. I suspect at this point in my life, I would like her version better. But the publisher copy also says this:
The first half of To Write as if Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.
This is not at all like Geoff Dyer! It sounds like the first half of the book is not about Guibert at all. It sounds a bit like Drifts, which is, among many other things, about friendship, language, and the internet. The second half is a notebook. I’m not sure what that means, except that it’s likely fragmentary and informal. I’m also not sure what “the doubled history of two bodies” means, but the Guibert book is about having AIDS in the 1980s, so here we get to the part I’m expecting, the personal response to/meditation on Guibert. The publisher copy goes on:
Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre.
Guibert as a ghost? Zambreno investigates his methods by adopting them? I’m wondering if her book has any literary analysis at all. Perhaps Guibert’s writing is really not the subject, or at least not in the way it is if you’re writing literary criticism, doing close readings of the text. That’s not a problem, as far as I’m concerned; what’s on offer here sounds wonderful, although I’m still not entirely sure what it is. The publisher’s copy ends this way:
The book asks, as Foucault once did, "What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body": illness, pregnancy, and death.
So it’s a twenty-first century, feminist response to Guibert, with some Foucault thrown in, but “response” meaning something more like “taking inspiration from” or “using as a starting point” rather than an account of what she thinks it means and how she felt about it. I guess. If that makes sense.
At any rate, I recently read To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. I thought it was … fine? Okay? Frankly, I was a little disappointed, but that may be because I read it knowing it’s an important book for Zambreno, so it held the possibility of being an important book for me. My expectations were high. I wanted the experience to be like reading a book by Zambreno, but Guibert just doesn’t speak to me like Zambreno does, or at least he doesn’t yet. Perhaps reading Zambreno’s book will change that. I found the book interesting for historical reasons and there were many great moments. But it is by no means likely to be a book that stays with me.
Hervé Guibert is a French writer who died of AIDS in 1991. He had just turned 36. To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, published in 1990, is a novel, but I’m guessing it’s fair to call it a “lightly fictionalized” version of Guibert’s own life (see the publisher’s note above about his “slippery, scarcely classifiable genre”). The book’s narrator is writing a journal about his experiences throughout the 1980s first learning about AIDS, becoming ill and worrying about having AIDS, getting diagnosed with it, and finally grappling with the prospect of his death. The title of the book refers to his friend Bill who worked with a company that produced vaccines and who offered to get the narrator into an AIDS vaccine trial and then didn’t follow through (which wouldn’t have helped anyway, but he doesn’t know that).
The book is loose, informal, and rambling, as you might expect a personal journal to be. It’s very gossipy. Guibert was close friends with Michel Foucault, who appears in the book as "Muzil,” a charismatic, moody, complicated person who also struggles with AIDS but refuses to acknowledge it. Guibert writes about the doings of his friends, some of which are interesting and others not. He writes about his many, many doctor visits, all revealing of how no one knew what to do with AIDS patients. The narrator searches around for reliable sources of information and has to figure out whom to trust and what to act on and what to ignore. He travels, he writes, he worries, he watches Muzil slowly die, he thinks about his own looming death.
Among the best parts of the book are the early sections when he describes his friendship with Muzil and those moments scattered throughout when he turns inward and writes at length about his own death. These are immensely sad and horrifying, thinking about how he might have lived much longer if he hadn’t contracted the disease at the precise time he did. The details about his symptoms, his and his friends’ efforts to understand the disease, their struggle to get help in a medical system that couldn’t help them, surrounded by people who didn’t understand them, are all moving as well as historically important.
There’s so much that’s good in this book! It just doesn’t speak to me in that life-changing way my favorite books do and that I was hoping it would. I am endlessly curious to see what Zambreno’s new book has to say and how, exactly, it will speak to me.
Publishing This Week
New books I haven’t yet read that I’m adding to my TBR. The section is long this week because March 2nd is a HUGE day for new books.
An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter (Columbia University Press, originally published in 1995): A semi-autobiographical novel about a single day in the 1980s, first published in 1995. The narrator talks to her sister and considers her decision to move back to Japan from the U.S. I loved Mizumura’s A True Novel, so a new book is good news.
Poetics of Work by Noémi Lefebvre, translated by Sophie Lewis (Transit Press): a novel about an unemployed poet (!) during a state of emergency in France. Also, an Oulipian experiment written without gender markers for the narrator.
Little Snow Landscape by Robert Walser, translated by Tom Whalen (NYRB): previously unpublished short prose by an author on my “Authors It’s Practically a Crime I Haven’t Read Yet” list.
Zabor, or The Psalms by Kamel Daoud, translated by Emma Ramadan (Other Press): Emma Ramadan is a star translator, so I check out anything she has worked on. This one is a response to/retelling of the Arabian Nights, similar to Kamel Daoud’s reworking of Camus’s The Stranger in his book The Meursault Investigation. Zabor writes in order to stave off his father’s death.
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Engel (Verso): I mean, that title! This is a book about female desire, consent, and sexuality in the #MeToo era.
Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer by Jamie Figueroa (Catapult): a novel about two siblings in the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas, their childhood home. One sibling tries to keep the other safe after their mother’s death.
Fem by Magda Carneci, translated by Sean Cotter (Deep Vellum): Magda Carneci is a Romanian poet, and this is her only novel. It’s written as a letter addressed to the man she plans to leave, full of stories and images from her life.
Recently Acquired
Over the last year, when I’ve wanted to do something to make me feel better, I’ve bought books. As you can see from the length of my recent lists, February was rough. The stack below came from the Harvard Bookstore warehouse sale. They had beautiful books for only $5 or $6 each, so of course I had to buy them!
Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, translated by Geraldine Harcourt (Picador, 2020, originally published in 1978): fiction.
Space Invaders by Nona Fernández, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Graywolf, 2019, originally published in 2013): fiction.
Negrophobia by Darius James (NYRB, 2019, originally published in 1992): fiction.
The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns (NYRB, 2018, originally published in 1985): fiction.
Death is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price (Picador, 2019, originally published in 2016): fiction.
Book of Hours by Kevin Young (Knopf, 2014): poetry.
Homie by Danez Smith (Graywolf, 2020): poetry.
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky (Graywolf, 2019): poetry.
Pet by Akwaeke Emezi (Make Me a World, 2019): by the author of The Death of Vivek Oji, which was great. I bought this on a whim while checking out a relatively new bookstore one town over from me (if you’re local, it’s Turning the Page Books in Monroe). Fiction.
Slipping by Mohamed Kheir, translated by Robin Moger (Two Lines Press, publishing this June): a review copy from the publisher. Fiction.
In Concrete by Anne Garréta, translated by Emma Ramadan (Deep Vellum Press, publishing this April): a review copy from the publisher. Fiction.
Currently Reading
This is where I clarify that I wrote most of this newsletter a week ago, before I decided to take a trip to see my parents in Rochester. My mother is ill and my father is struggling to care for her, so I took Cormac with me to help out a bit and to let him visit my mother before her illness gets worse (which it will). So I haven’t been reading as much as usual. However, I did finish A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, which I have been reading for a long time, and I also finished my audiobook, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, which I had been listening to for a long time. And I started to reread Ongoingness by Sarah Manguso, as a book I find comforting, and, since it is a reread, doesn’t require as much concentration as I would want to give a book I’m reading for the first time.
The Cormac Report
I took four books on my trip to Rochester, one to finish and three so I could have options when I finished the first, but I knew I wouldn’t read much while we were gone. Cormac, on the other hand, brought multiple large stacks. He had some in the car already — because you always need books in the car to keep you company when you’re a kid — and as we were packing he kept adding more and more, including his new favorite series, The Last Kids on Earth. Some of the nicest moments on this trip came when we were settling down to bed — sharing the same guest room in my parents’ house, me on a futon, him on an air mattress — reading together to help us unwind before sleep. He normally reads in bed, but never with someone else around, so this was exciting. I was afraid he would simply chatter to me the entire time, but he settled into his book and I settled into mine. He reported every now and then about the latest antics of those last kids on earth, but then he would turn back to his book and get absorbed again, as would I. It was absolutely the nicest possible way to end the day.
Have a good week everyone!