STATIONS

In a powerful testimony to two men's struggle with AIDS, Weiss writes of caring for his dying lover in a posthumous publication that coincides with the 20th anniversary of the emergence of AIDS. Written in the form of a short novel in which the names are changed (but presumably the events and the emotions are from life), the book charts the decline of Weiss's lover (dubbed Alexander in the memoir) from the first signs of the syndrome to his death in 1984 and the scattering of his ashes. Weiss, who died of AIDS in 1991, writes with unapologetic directness that can startle with its simplicity and pain: "Though the hospital can't do anything about Alexander's fevers, they give the illusion they can. At home his fevers become a nightmare. They turn the bed into a swamp." Edited by Marilyn Yalom (History of the Wife, etc.), a close friend of Weiss and his lover, this short memoir does not sentimentalize the deaths or the sexual and personal lives of his subjects. At the end, while Weiss's hands are still "powdered with Alexander's ashes," he has a consoling sexual encounter—"maybe our ejaculation coincided with Alexander's disappearance in the furnace"—as he is en route to Morocco to make contact with a former sexual partner. Weiss's honesty is reminiscent of Paul Monette's 1988 Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir; while this brief book lacks the detailed, nearly obsessive contemplation of Monette's, it has a harmony and cohesive texture missing from that earlier book. (July)