FICTION

TO THE FRIEND WHO DID NOT SAVE MY LIFE by Herve Guibert (Atheneum: $19.95; 205 pp.). Le Figaro describes Guibert’s novel, a best seller in France, as “a book of panic, a book of irony.” Now in translation by Linda Coverdale, the story, written as a journal, traces the “borderline of uncertainty” between hope and despair. The narrator has AIDS. He vacillates between a willful acceptance of certain death, even being fascinated by it, and the hope held out by a friend that a cure is possible. This friend, mentioned in the book’s title, knows about a new vaccine and tantalizes him with promises of providing it, but he doesn’t deliver. The narrator swings from trivial concerns to thoughts of suicide. He delivers up graphic sex, gruesome details about AIDS and poignant scenes of the deaths of friends as his own health declines. This may be fiction, but it reads like fact.