Le Protocole compassionnel

Le Protocole compassionnel is “quite simply the sequel to À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie: exactly what I had said I would never do. A year and a half separated these two books. The time of renouncing writing, the time of experience (…) A new drug appeared, very difficult to obtain and uncertain, still in the experimental stage, DDI (…) In France, for now, it is given to patients who are at the last extremity, under a protocol described by doctors as ‘compassionate.’ It was this new drug that allowed me to overcome my exhaustion, and to write. If À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie recounted the realization of illness and its work on the body and the soul, Le Protocole compassionnel recounts the astonishment and pain, the rage and sadness of a thirty-five-year-old man onto whom the body of an old man has been grafted.”

À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie had met with considerable success the previous year. Guibert’s appearance on Apostrophes, his portrayal of Michel Foucault under the name Muzil, and above all the public appearance of a young writer whose face already bore the marks of illness, had produced a shock. The book sold around 100,000 copies, an exceptional phenomenon for a writer who had never before enjoyed such an audience, but who had become, in spite of himself, one of the public faces of AIDS in France.

Guibert describes the world of the hospital, but also his last stay on the Island of Elba, where he would be buried a few months later, following his death on 27 December 1991 in Clamart.

Old foxing to the front wrapper.