Fiction often trails some distance behind the traumatic events of the present. It took a decade before there was a substantial fictional response to the slaughter of the World War I, while the narrative of the Holocaust is still being explored. Responses to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s were, however, rapid. In 1982, a complex series of illnesses were first identified as Aids and “Silence equals Death” soon became a popular slogan for gay activists campaigning for better recognition and treatment for AIDS. Gay writers in the 1980s felt a moral and political imperative to respond quickly to the crisis.
Fiction of the past 20 years has dealt less confidently with the aftermath of AIDS in the West. The contemporary issues are more subtle and complex: We have had the arrival of an effective combination therapy, the continuing lives of a generation who (like me) had assumed they faced certain death, and the “bug chasers” who actively look to be infected with the HIV virus and “barebackers” who enjoy the thrill of unprotected sex.
So Tristan Garcia’s Hate: A Romance (first published in France in 2008 as La meilleure part des hommes) is a welcome and a rare novel. Its ambitious narrative begins in the 1980s. The story — four young characters coming of age as a city embraces a thriving gay culture which is also starting to recognize the threat of AIDS — is familiar territory from 1980s fiction. But while the first wave of AIDS fiction was overwhelmingly American, Hate: A Romance is a very French story. Garcia’s characters are university-educated Parisians, the direct descendants of Jean-Luc Godard’s “children of Karl Marx and Coca Cola”. The reader senses that Garcia, like Godard, shares a complex relationship with his characters: He is sympathetic to young people who are guided more by their reading of Foucault and Spinoza than they are by common sense (this is Garcia’s first novel, but he is a published philosopher), while laughing with us at their more pretentious thoughts and poses.
Something of the freshness of Garcia’s perspective can also be explained by his age. Born in 1981, he is writing a historical novel, a vivid imagining of the Paris gay scene of the 1980s and 1990s and of the feuds conducted by gay activists in the French media of the period. This can sometimes make for disconcerting reading if — as I was — you were there at the time. Garcia’s imagined past doesn’t always quite match up with my remembered one. But the opening chapters of the book capture a mood that I found instantly recognizable: the excitement of being young, intellectually arrogant, sexually adventurous and bewildered by the arrival of the AIDS epidemic.
As his narrative charts events leading up to the present day, Garcia is able to explore new territory for AIDS fiction. His characters barely acknowledge the arrival of combination therapy in 1996 and the promise that it brings of turning AIDS from a terminal disease into a chronic condition. By then they are too consumed by the feud that provides the central thread of the novel, that between the gay activist Dominique Rossi, who moves ever closer to the center of the French political establishment, and the radical William Miller, who rejects safer sex as a heterosexual constraint and promotes barebacking as a political act of defiance. There’s also an equally bitter rift between Miller and the media philosopher Leibowitz, as Miller moves from a pro-Palestinian stance to a paranoid anti-Semitism.
Garcia — and his narrator, the journalist Elizabeth Levallois, who is Leibowitz’s lover — seem increasingly drawn to Miller, the most obviously colorful character in the novel. But as the pettiness of Miller’s feuding becomes reductive and repetitious, the novel threatens to grind to a halt. Perhaps French readers, aware of the similar and very public real-life feud between gay activists Didier Lestrade and Guillame Dustan, would have been carried through some of these duller passages by the jeu d’esprit of a roman a clef.
But just when it seems that the novel has got itself trapped in a corner, Garcia steers the narrative forward: the last hundred pages achieve a depth of insight and compassion that is previously lacking. In this final section, he captures brilliantly the impossible choice facing the radical intellectual in an unsympathetic society: between becoming marginalized to the point of self-destruction and moving into the safer ground of the mainstream. It’s ironic that Garcia, who is just 30 himself, only really seems able to look his characters fully in the eye once they are in their 40s and making the sad, sober choices of middle age.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built