Kigali, Rwanda

Kigali, Rwanda is the fictional autobiography of a young American diplomat named Derek Johnston who, in the eerie calm of pre-civil war Rwanda in the early 1980s, learns that he has contracted a new and relatively unknown virus, then called HTLV. Since he was 16, Derek has lived for his sometimes secretive and always tempestuous relations with women. In Kigali, he contracts the disease from the local prostitutes as a love affair shatters. Writing at night, Derek is haunted by his childhood in Paris, his high school years in Illinois, his time as a photographer in New York, his passage through Munich, and the women who have defined his life. Struggling to understand the people and events of his distant and recent past, he both discovers and imposes meaning, as all of us are destined to do.Kigali, Rwanda is a meditation on sex, exile, and the constraints of the social world, on the intensity of life and desire and the vanity of human wishes.