![]() ![]() For all his prickly combativeness and wounded vanity, Brodkey doesn't rage at the dying of the light. This book, portions of which appeared in the New Yorker, is many things: a journal that catalogs the daily indignities (the countless pills, the loss of strength and independence, the vagaries of public perception) attendant on AIDS a memoir poignant with self-doubt and regret a calm meditation on (and preparation for) death. ![]() From the time he was diagnosed with AIDS, while editing his novel Profane Friendship in the spring of 1993, until his death earlier this year, continuing to write-to convey order on formlessness-seems to have been not only an anodyne but a constant, sustaining desire for Brodkey. Yet it's difficult to imagine a writer better equipped to accomplish that grim task than Brodkey, whose restless intellect and elegant, precise language bestowed an almost physical beauty on the abstraction of human consciousness. At first glance it seems an obvious-and cruel-irony that recording the ``passage into nonexistence'' should fall to a writer whose lifework was so vibrantly obsessed with chronicling the self. With remarkable grace and stunning bravery, Brodkey (The Runaway Soul, 1991, etc.) chronicles his own harrowing slide into illness and death.
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