Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary by Hervé Guibert (review)

Two days after Christmas 1991, Hervé Guibert died of complications resulting from an unsuccessful suicide attempt. He was thirty-six years of age.

Three years earlier, this prolific author and photographer had been diagnosed with AIDS, a syndrome that had already ended the lives of many of his close friends (including Michel Foucault). Rapidly becoming one of France’s most outspoken critics of the appalling prejudices routinely experienced by AIDS sufferers, Guibert published (among other books) a powerful memoir entitled À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie [To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life], which remains a classic, and made a searing home video La Pudeur ou l’impudeur [Modesty and Shame]. Throughout it all, he watched his own body literally dissolving before his eyes. Prior to his illness, he had been renowned for his enormous blue eyes, blond curls, and angelic face. He even claimed that prostitutes in Mexico were so enamoured by his beauty that they offered themselves to him gratis. By the time of his death, his limbs were as thin as they had been when he was a child.

Now, a quarter of a century after his death, his hospital diary, entitled Cytomegalovirus, has been reissued. Brilliantly translated by Clara Orban, this elegant little volume intends to bring Guibert’s prodigious talents to a wider English-language readership. It is a more than laudable aim. Cytomegalovirus is an unsentimental account of one man’s AIDS-related decline, but it also reflects on the more general theme of dignity in dying. By eschewing AIDS as metaphor, signified or signifier, Guibert takes readers deep into the existential solitude that was his lived experience near the end of his life.

The diary is named after cytomegalovirus retinitis, a devastating complication of AIDS that often leads to blindness. Guibert recalled the day when, waiting alone in an outpatient room at the hospital, he was told the dreadful news. It was like “a big punch in the guts, it’s sadness, despair, you forbid yourself to cry,” he recalled. Fighting back tears, he looked up to the ceiling and observed “a huge black spider coming out of a hole in the heating ducts” (51). The sense of doom was overwhelming.

When he was admitted into hospital, things took a turn for the worse. He had many reasons to complain: his IV pole is practically immobile; he is forced to eat soup and cheese using the same spoon, and worse of all, the rooms are filthy. He rails against the unnecessary indignities that are routinely heaped upon desperately ill patients, including having to wear transparent gowns on the way to the operating theatres. He sets himself up in an adversarial role with the medical staff, noting that it was “a test of wills. … They want you to lose, they count on wearing you down. Then, according to the situation, they respect or they flatten you” (40). Only once does he show real compassion for the nursing staff, and that involved a “very young, pretty, precise, courageous” nurse. He admitted that “there is nothing more terrific for a patient” than to be looked after by such a nurse, even though “when she leaves the hospital at 10 p.m. to go home, she’s worn out” (63).

Guibert is worse than simply a grumpy patient. In fact, he is self-absorbed and fails to empathize with other people. For example, he informs his parents that he is going into hospital, but then refuses to tell them which one. He seems to think that “the cruelty I would inflict on myself by calling them” would be greater than what they suffer by being unable to contact him (66).

Guibert feels no compunction about referring to one nurse as “The bitch” (55). He seems to have a particular animosity towards Asian carers. On one occasion, he chastises a nurse who comes to take his blood pressure. Rather pompously...