A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning

French novelist Hervé Guilbert's 1991 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, is about a narrator named Hervé Guilbert who, after his close friend Muzil (really, Michel Foucault) dies of AIDS, begins to realize his symptoms are the same. In this same tradition of fictionalized memoir, this novel's narrator, called Catherine Mavrikakis, explores the perspective not of dying, but of the one l…