Hervé has never been a popular name in Quebec. Nevertheless, Montrealer Catherine Mavrikakis opens her short novel A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning by saying that all her friends are named Hervé and most are HIV-positive. This is an exaggeration, of course, but the statement sets the stage for this quirky dissertation on death and the reaction of the living to dying.

It also prepares us for later references to Hervé Guibert, the French intellectual whose book about the dying of philosopher Michel Foucault set the standard for meditations on mortality back when AIDS was frighteningly new. In one short chapter after another, Mavrikakis tells how her Hervés die – in plane crashes or in hospitals or by jumping out of windows. She tell us the idiosyncratic ways she mourns – by not taking care of her hair once her hairdresser succumbs to AIDS, for example. She describes the way she and her lover Olga help one of the Hervés die. She adds that she and Olga now have amassed a small fortune from the bequests the Hervés have left them – lesbians don’t get HIV, she notes. Still, surviving all those dead friends is not easy, she says.

No doubt there are readers who will be moved by Mavrikakis’s cool prose (translated with considerable verve from the French by Nathalie Stephens). Others will be amused by her references to various intellectual movements, and caught up in the games she plays with her dead. But anyone wanting to read a narrative should look elsewhere because there are only episodes here, with no coherent story. Other readers will wish Mavrikakis had taken seriously what she says at the end of the book: “I am sometimes so tired of commemorating. Let it stop one day, let it end, let there be no more talk of my rendezvous with the dead.”