Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
2.0
Book Review
Borrowed Time
2/5 stars
"The Birdcage" reimagined as an end of life memoir
*******
This Book Is Over the Top Wordy. (Monette stretched out for 342 pages what he could have easily put into 171.)
In a lot of ways, the book puts me in mind of Joan Didion: lots of fine phrases / oblique prose to avoid giving too much detail and somewhat mask the fact that there were not really that many plot events.
But in this case with an added measure of.... (how to say?)......breathy flaminess?
The dislikeable Monette's word choice and presentation put him right *at* the borderline of being a drag queen. (He presents like Nathan Lane's character in "The Birdcage." I don't have to guess who was the girl/bottom in *that* relationship. )
Sample sentences
1. (p.65, while waiting for a routine test result): "Here at the pitch of emergency I can only lay out the fragments of what seared my frantic heart."
2. (p.175, watching a Writer's Guild screening of a film): "I became so unraveled with grief at the end that I couldn't leave the theater till I had composed myself. Anything with love and death together was unwatchable."
3.(p. 39): "I spent my afternoons shopping, a blur of packages mailed to the four corners, mounds of presents for Cesar and Rog."
4. (p. 231): "But I was overreacting to every slight and turmoil, and he couldn't take it. A couple of times he bellowed at me to get out of his room, dissolving me in tears."
The author seemed to be bursting into tears every second or third page.
The person who was actually dying (Roger Horowitz, remember him?) seemed to be upbeat at times and stolid at others.
*******
1. If you want to read an end-of-life-memoir (one with florid prose minus the Borderline Drag Queen Quality), I would sooner recommend "When Breath Becomes Air," by Paul Kalanithi.
The first thing is that Kalanithi was the patient who was dying of cancer when he wrote his death memoir. (Paul Monette did die of AIDS 7 years after the publication of this book.)
But Monette didn't have the first person perspective of a man coming to terms with his own mortality.
And while the memoir was about the death of his longtime partner, he seemed to only play a supporting role in this book--a distant second to Monette's constant drama queen-ishness
2. If you want to read a book about the political aspects of delays in addressing the AIDS problem, I would sooner recommend Randy Shilts "And The Band Played On." Also, if you want to read about the Fool's Gold therapeutics that came out in the first year or two of the AIDS crisis, that book is pertinent.
3. If you want to read about the trial and error nature of medicine, I would sooner recommend "Snowball in a Blizzard." Steven Hatch.
*******
There is an excessive amount of auto-fellating/ humblebragging/name dropping about all of his trips to Greece/ Egypt/ The Nile/ etc. in the first class section and drinking wine here or watching that sunset there.
Monette has to mention all the people that he knows from Hollywood / writers, and of course when he talked about getting robbed he had to let us know that it was a Mercedes and that they switched to driving a Jaguar after the Mercedes was stolen (p.39). And "The Jag" gets mentioned five or six times in this book, in case we forgot.
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. It is just amazing how often people who are physicians/public health officials do not know what they are doing, and will not admit it. (Chemotherapy was, at one time, a front line treatment for HIV/AIDS. I guess it makes sense that something that had the name "gay cancer" would be treated with the chemotherapeutic agent, even if it had none of the symptoms of a cancer.)
2. Raising a family really is a good way to go. (It would have solved a lot of problems that the characters in this book had to suffer.)
Some hypothetical guy who gets the news that his life will end in a few months (and he has already raised his children to adulthood), will likely take it in stride and just be grateful that there is someone there to throw dirt over him / scatter his ashes when it's all finished.
Meanwhile, all of these many men in this book who passed away were relying on the friends that they had up until the end or their latest boyfriend to wrap up things.
The tragic events in this book bring the nuclear/extended family into sharp focus as a problem solving device.
3. Having a religious tradition to answer end of life questions is not such a bad idea.
In my own experience--the Orthodox Jewish case-- death is very clearly understood as being inextricably linked with life.
Celebration of birth, adulthood, and finally mourning rituals during death are all contained within the same siddur (prayer book).
Funerals are all done matter of factly, predictably and usually take between 30 minutes to an hour.
The author's melodramatic tone notwithstanding, there was just so much fumbling and anguish in this book...... and it seems like it could well have been otherwise.
There's no reason that a same-sex couple couldn't be about the business of raising a family.
Children may seem annoying (and I know this, because I have a house full of them that are running around punching holes in the walls and making yellow snow as I try to read this book), but you have to balance the long-term benefit of raising them against a whole bunch of dinners and outings with people that don't likely take the same interest in you as family members would in hard times.
Verdict: Not recommended. Especially not in preference to any of the above three books that I mentioned.
New words/phrases:
Purlieu
Gelid
Doubloons
Ballast
Stevedore meal
Moonwalk
Potboiler
Sententious
Prurience
Chaparral
"That way, madness lies."
Lassitude
Agora
Wimbly
Lambent
Borrowed Time
2/5 stars
"The Birdcage" reimagined as an end of life memoir
*******
This Book Is Over the Top Wordy. (Monette stretched out for 342 pages what he could have easily put into 171.)
In a lot of ways, the book puts me in mind of Joan Didion: lots of fine phrases / oblique prose to avoid giving too much detail and somewhat mask the fact that there were not really that many plot events.
But in this case with an added measure of.... (how to say?)......breathy flaminess?
The dislikeable Monette's word choice and presentation put him right *at* the borderline of being a drag queen. (He presents like Nathan Lane's character in "The Birdcage." I don't have to guess who was the girl/bottom in *that* relationship. )
Sample sentences
1. (p.65, while waiting for a routine test result): "Here at the pitch of emergency I can only lay out the fragments of what seared my frantic heart."
2. (p.175, watching a Writer's Guild screening of a film): "I became so unraveled with grief at the end that I couldn't leave the theater till I had composed myself. Anything with love and death together was unwatchable."
3.(p. 39): "I spent my afternoons shopping, a blur of packages mailed to the four corners, mounds of presents for Cesar and Rog."
4. (p. 231): "But I was overreacting to every slight and turmoil, and he couldn't take it. A couple of times he bellowed at me to get out of his room, dissolving me in tears."
The author seemed to be bursting into tears every second or third page.
The person who was actually dying (Roger Horowitz, remember him?) seemed to be upbeat at times and stolid at others.
*******
1. If you want to read an end-of-life-memoir (one with florid prose minus the Borderline Drag Queen Quality), I would sooner recommend "When Breath Becomes Air," by Paul Kalanithi.
The first thing is that Kalanithi was the patient who was dying of cancer when he wrote his death memoir. (Paul Monette did die of AIDS 7 years after the publication of this book.)
But Monette didn't have the first person perspective of a man coming to terms with his own mortality.
And while the memoir was about the death of his longtime partner, he seemed to only play a supporting role in this book--a distant second to Monette's constant drama queen-ishness
2. If you want to read a book about the political aspects of delays in addressing the AIDS problem, I would sooner recommend Randy Shilts "And The Band Played On." Also, if you want to read about the Fool's Gold therapeutics that came out in the first year or two of the AIDS crisis, that book is pertinent.
3. If you want to read about the trial and error nature of medicine, I would sooner recommend "Snowball in a Blizzard." Steven Hatch.
*******
There is an excessive amount of auto-fellating/ humblebragging/name dropping about all of his trips to Greece/ Egypt/ The Nile/ etc. in the first class section and drinking wine here or watching that sunset there.
Monette has to mention all the people that he knows from Hollywood / writers, and of course when he talked about getting robbed he had to let us know that it was a Mercedes and that they switched to driving a Jaguar after the Mercedes was stolen (p.39). And "The Jag" gets mentioned five or six times in this book, in case we forgot.
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. It is just amazing how often people who are physicians/public health officials do not know what they are doing, and will not admit it. (Chemotherapy was, at one time, a front line treatment for HIV/AIDS. I guess it makes sense that something that had the name "gay cancer" would be treated with the chemotherapeutic agent, even if it had none of the symptoms of a cancer.)
2. Raising a family really is a good way to go. (It would have solved a lot of problems that the characters in this book had to suffer.)
Some hypothetical guy who gets the news that his life will end in a few months (and he has already raised his children to adulthood), will likely take it in stride and just be grateful that there is someone there to throw dirt over him / scatter his ashes when it's all finished.
Meanwhile, all of these many men in this book who passed away were relying on the friends that they had up until the end or their latest boyfriend to wrap up things.
The tragic events in this book bring the nuclear/extended family into sharp focus as a problem solving device.
3. Having a religious tradition to answer end of life questions is not such a bad idea.
In my own experience--the Orthodox Jewish case-- death is very clearly understood as being inextricably linked with life.
Celebration of birth, adulthood, and finally mourning rituals during death are all contained within the same siddur (prayer book).
Funerals are all done matter of factly, predictably and usually take between 30 minutes to an hour.
The author's melodramatic tone notwithstanding, there was just so much fumbling and anguish in this book...... and it seems like it could well have been otherwise.
There's no reason that a same-sex couple couldn't be about the business of raising a family.
Children may seem annoying (and I know this, because I have a house full of them that are running around punching holes in the walls and making yellow snow as I try to read this book), but you have to balance the long-term benefit of raising them against a whole bunch of dinners and outings with people that don't likely take the same interest in you as family members would in hard times.
Verdict: Not recommended. Especially not in preference to any of the above three books that I mentioned.
New words/phrases:
Purlieu
Gelid
Doubloons
Ballast
Stevedore meal
Moonwalk
Potboiler
Sententious
Prurience
Chaparral
"That way, madness lies."
Lassitude
Agora
Wimbly
Lambent