Articles Available Online

Shortly after the release of his controversial novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life in 1990, Hervé Guibert announced his retirement from writing, much to the upset of his newly-won readers ‘I don’t see what else I could write,’ the French author, critic and photographer, then visibly emaciated, told anchorman Bernard Pivot on the primetime literary programme Apostrophes He already had some fifteen publications under his belt, ranging from novels to essay collections and a photo-novel — most sitting uncomfortably between autobiography and fiction However, none had received anywhere near the amount of attention as To the Friend, a poignant recounting of the aesthete’s battle with AIDS He died in December 1991, at the age of thirty-six   Born to a middle-class family in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Cloud, Guibert spent his early years in the French capital His childhood was scored by the ‘noise of sagging bodies’ and ‘skulls shattered on the tiles’, heard during regular visits to slaughterhouses with his father, a veterinarian inspector These morbid memories, starkly described in his early works, are typical of a macabre tendency — following in the tradition of French writers including the Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet — which punctuates much of his writing Although his initial literary success was modest, the angelic-looking writer with the golden curls soon became a fixture of the Parisian intelligentsia, befriending everyone from Michel Foucault to Mathieu Lindon and Sophie Calle while making a living as a pigiste {freelancer} at Le Monde’s culture desk   Republished earlier this year in English by Semiotext(e), To the Friend is enjoying a new life