Cytomegalovirus A Hospitalization Diary

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.

Hervé Guibert 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. Among these, he is perhaps best known for To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, published in 1991. He died of complications from AIDS that same year.

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, My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community, and AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures.

Todd Meyers is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy and the coeditor of Fordham's Forms of Living series.