Notes of a Desolate Man

About

A man watches his closest friend die of AIDS in 1990s Taipei, and the vigil becomes a meditation on love, loss, homosexuality, and the particular solitude of being gay in a society that would prefer you didn't exist. The narrator is quiet, bookish, private. His dying friend was the opposite — an activist, a fighter, a man who refused to hide. Zhu Tianwen's novel is one of the landmark works of queer Taiwanese literature — written with a philosophical density that treats the narrator's grief as an occasion for thinking about what it means to live honestly in a world that punishes honesty. A novel about the desolation of surviving someone who was braver than you.