[REVIEW] Paul Monette, Borrowed Time

[rfmcdonald]

Paul Monette's 1988 Borrowed Time, a memoir of the last years that he spent with his partner Roger Horwitz before the latter's death from AIDS, is typically cited as one of the most important works in early HIV/AIDS literature. Certainly it's a well-written book, and certainly it's a sad book, but for the longest time it confused me as to why this is the only book from that literature from that time that makes me cry. Then I remembered Margo Lanagan and her masterly "Singing My Sister Down", and realized that Monette manages to capture the terrible pain of a prolonged departure so masterly. Reading Borrowed Time, one follows Monette as he gets used to having less and less of Horwitz as his AIDS progressed, eventually retreating, attenuated, to the margins of consciousness. Still, even at the end when Horwitz was about to pass, there was still so much of him there, that the moment of final separation is unbearable.