Member Review

Jonathan’s HIV positive status is more like an existential sickness. It is expressed in the staccato rhythm of abrupt sentences, like an endless list. It is an inventory of parts, separated and reduced to basic elements, not even eyes but a single isolated eye, not tears but salt.

In the book’s wide landscape of Milan and its hinterland events are truncated. No encounter comes to fruition. Relationships are cut short, things left unsaid. In his casual sexual adventures Jonathan is often being stood up, let down, or else he doesn’t wait around. Someone always withdraws too soon. This is a violent Milan. Violence radiates out from the home, ‘I open the front door and let mama’s screams fill the stairwell.’

Jonathon’s mantra is an obsessively repeated ‘I’, only punctuated by a ‘me’ and a ‘my’. The effect is to slow the reading, but to what purpose? Perhaps to indicate the tedium of illness and fixation.
Other characters are little more than the wardens of his body, protecting it, restricting it, ferrying it around, or offering it consolation. But only the I matters. The others are like spectres, tangible only through the treats and comfort they smuggle close to the body. The ‘I’ is numb to the world; other humans threaten to contaminate its integrity.

Jonathan welcomes his HIV diagnosis. It is a validation, his body’s pathology self-certifying his corporal unity. Conventionally, the existentialist rejects the system, but Jonathan embraces it. He is accepted into the great society of the health system, of the afflicted and medicated. “I’m always in a good mood when I go to the hospital,” he says.