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Monopolies of Loss
The tragedy of the AIDS epidemic becomes the central theme of a collection of stories that explores the effects of the disease on the victims and on the people around them
250 pages, Paperback
Published March 15, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 22, 2025
[I always think that for older books like this one if it is possible you should read the reviews it received at the time of publication. Unfortunately it is not usually easy to find reviews which are not behind paywalls but I have found one for this collection of stories at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en..., and highly recommend reading it.]
This is going to be a digressive review and if you wish to go directly to my remarks about Adam Mars-Jones and this book skim over the opening paragraphs and start at the point marked REVIEW.
While reading this book I had a conversation with someone who although they are old enough to have a child at university told me that until they watched the 2021 UK drama 'Its A Sin' they had known nothing about AIDS or what had happened back in the past. This admission didn't shock, surprise or hurt me - I was delighted because there is nothin g more pleasing then a nightmare which has been shattered, a disease which has been overcome and HIV/AIDS was always nothing more then a disease - not the trumpet of God calling for repentance but a boring virus that needed to be nullified.
Of course having watched 'Its a Sin' my new acquaintance didn't really know anything about HIV/AIDS - it is excellent but it is unrepresentative because those early Technicolor days of obviously nightmare wrongs were succeeded by not months but years of incremental days of 'two-steps forward and one step back' until we reached here, in 2025, and AIDS is about as frightening as a Halloween monster masque. Because of this I have recently been reading various novels, on and from the years of 'AIDS', and have found many of them wanting. Too often their prose attempts to encompass everything from Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard announcing 'I am ready for my close-up Mr. de Mille' to Tosca on the battlements of Castel Sant'Angelo and Lulu or La Dame aux Camélias expiring beautifully soaring violins. It was always OTT and operatic and dangerously close to bathos as it demanded to be seen as significant, important, meaningful anything but simply a horrible death by a nasty disease.
No death is unimportant and I can do no better then remind of the words of John Donne:
'No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
'If a cloud be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
'Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.'
Dying at 19 of AIDS or of a bullet at Srebrenica is indistinguishable because all death diminishes us, because in the end there is only absence. Death is death, it is not a metaphor and never has ultimate meaning and certainly not redemptive power or glory.
REVIEW:
I read the books of Adam Mars-Jones dealing with AIDS years ago and liked them but reading them again I have been overwhelmed by just how fine they are and find it inexplicable that they are not currently in print and on university or or even school curriculum's. His novel 'The Waters of Thirst' set in the era of AIDS in which the narrator dies of something totally unrelated to age is one of the finest pieces of writing on AIDS because it isn't about AIDS (see my footnote *1 below). This collection of stories about AIDS is as far from the grandiose, OTT, grand guignol, finding meaning and metaphor in AIDS style of writing as it was possible to be. It is no coincidence that the only writer I could possibly compare them to is Edmund White (see my footnote *2 below).
I loved these stories because I believe anyone could understand and identify with their protagonists, but maybe I should clarify, these are very 'English' in their understated emotion. This is not rending your clothes and dusting your head with dirt passion. This is weeping copiously in public and being ignored because such displays are embarrassing. Maybe English people, maybe everyone, are free of those white middle class, cautious, reticence and hesitations. I am not English but that element of 'stiff upper lip' restraint was once the universal default position of a certain person - it could be Edmund White in America or me in Ireland. It showed not a lack of feeling but an intensity, a genuineness that we weren't going to fritter. That is the toner of the stories in this collection, but also they are full of self deprecating humour and courage.
Not that there isn't passion and anger:
"We were angry...(We) had given bouquets that appeared at the graveside stripped of their messages. We had laboured to clean the bathrooms of the dead, so that their heirs so their heirs found nothing so much as a stain to alarm them - and had our names forgotten, however many times we were introduced. We had held our candles high at Trafalgar Square at vigils, year after year, forming helpful compositional groups on cue for press photographers that never got published..."
I defy you not to be moved by those words because they are the real crie de coeur that is screaming pain and loss at an indifferent world. If you want to know about AIDS read these stories they are what real literature is - honest, unaffected and without side.
*1 But then one of the best stories in this collection 'Summer Lightening' isn't about AIDS, none of the characters are even gay (or not gay - it just doesn't arise) it is about death, and much else, but dying doesn't become less or more because of AIDS. Its inclusion actually intensifies the impactof thd stories dealing directly with AIDS.
*2 Adam Mars-Jones and Edmund White published a joint collection of stories 'The Darker Proof' in 1988. The stories of Adam Mars-Jones from that collection are republished in Monopolies of Loss. Edmund White's stories in his collection 'Skinned Alive'. White's story 'Oracle' is one of the great AIDS stories and is a must read.
This is going to be a digressive review and if you wish to go directly to my remarks about Adam Mars-Jones and this book skim over the opening paragraphs and start at the point marked REVIEW.
While reading this book I had a conversation with someone who although they are old enough to have a child at university told me that until they watched the 2021 UK drama 'Its A Sin' they had known nothing about AIDS or what had happened back in the past. This admission didn't shock, surprise or hurt me - I was delighted because there is nothin g more pleasing then a nightmare which has been shattered, a disease which has been overcome and HIV/AIDS was always nothing more then a disease - not the trumpet of God calling for repentance but a boring virus that needed to be nullified.
Of course having watched 'Its a Sin' my new acquaintance didn't really know anything about HIV/AIDS - it is excellent but it is unrepresentative because those early Technicolor days of obviously nightmare wrongs were succeeded by not months but years of incremental days of 'two-steps forward and one step back' until we reached here, in 2025, and AIDS is about as frightening as a Halloween monster masque. Because of this I have recently been reading various novels, on and from the years of 'AIDS', and have found many of them wanting. Too often their prose attempts to encompass everything from Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard announcing 'I am ready for my close-up Mr. de Mille' to Tosca on the battlements of Castel Sant'Angelo and Lulu or La Dame aux Camélias expiring beautifully soaring violins. It was always OTT and operatic and dangerously close to bathos as it demanded to be seen as significant, important, meaningful anything but simply a horrible death by a nasty disease.
No death is unimportant and I can do no better then remind of the words of John Donne:
'No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
'If a cloud be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
'Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.'
Dying at 19 of AIDS or of a bullet at Srebrenica is indistinguishable because all death diminishes us, because in the end there is only absence. Death is death, it is not a metaphor and never has ultimate meaning and certainly not redemptive power or glory.
REVIEW:
I read the books of Adam Mars-Jones dealing with AIDS years ago and liked them but reading them again I have been overwhelmed by just how fine they are and find it inexplicable that they are not currently in print and on university or or even school curriculum's. His novel 'The Waters of Thirst' set in the era of AIDS in which the narrator dies of something totally unrelated to age is one of the finest pieces of writing on AIDS because it isn't about AIDS (see my footnote *1 below). This collection of stories about AIDS is as far from the grandiose, OTT, grand guignol, finding meaning and metaphor in AIDS style of writing as it was possible to be. It is no coincidence that the only writer I could possibly compare them to is Edmund White (see my footnote *2 below).
I loved these stories because I believe anyone could understand and identify with their protagonists, but maybe I should clarify, these are very 'English' in their understated emotion. This is not rending your clothes and dusting your head with dirt passion. This is weeping copiously in public and being ignored because such displays are embarrassing. Maybe English people, maybe everyone, are free of those white middle class, cautious, reticence and hesitations. I am not English but that element of 'stiff upper lip' restraint was once the universal default position of a certain person - it could be Edmund White in America or me in Ireland. It showed not a lack of feeling but an intensity, a genuineness that we weren't going to fritter. That is the toner of the stories in this collection, but also they are full of self deprecating humour and courage.
Not that there isn't passion and anger:
"We were angry...(We) had given bouquets that appeared at the graveside stripped of their messages. We had laboured to clean the bathrooms of the dead, so that their heirs so their heirs found nothing so much as a stain to alarm them - and had our names forgotten, however many times we were introduced. We had held our candles high at Trafalgar Square at vigils, year after year, forming helpful compositional groups on cue for press photographers that never got published..."
I defy you not to be moved by those words because they are the real crie de coeur that is screaming pain and loss at an indifferent world. If you want to know about AIDS read these stories they are what real literature is - honest, unaffected and without side.
*1 But then one of the best stories in this collection 'Summer Lightening' isn't about AIDS, none of the characters are even gay (or not gay - it just doesn't arise) it is about death, and much else, but dying doesn't become less or more because of AIDS. Its inclusion actually intensifies the impactof thd stories dealing directly with AIDS.
*2 Adam Mars-Jones and Edmund White published a joint collection of stories 'The Darker Proof' in 1988. The stories of Adam Mars-Jones from that collection are republished in Monopolies of Loss. Edmund White's stories in his collection 'Skinned Alive'. White's story 'Oracle' is one of the great AIDS stories and is a must read.
May 27, 2020
I have read bits and pieces of Adam Mars-Jones, including his excellent novel from the 90s, The Waters of Thirst. This collection of short stories predates that (1992) – I stumbled across it on Kenny’s Bookshop’s secondhand section and had to have it.
Firstly, it’s a collection of stories about AIDS, and boy, if that wasn’t a weird book to be reading at the start of quarantine in this pandemic. I felt like I was transported back in time, back to another disease that people didn’t understand, that people used as a weapon against others for the own personal gain, or bigotry.
Adam Mars-Jones, to be honest, writes lines so beautifully that I could read him write about paint dry and he presents nine stories (eight about AIDS, although some don’t even, purposely, mention the word, and the first, Slim, is a character’s personal nickname for the disease). Prescient, scary, this book is fully of relationships ending, of people trying to move on, of a real world that is distant and remote from their lives. It is a book, to put it bluntly, that is spookily about now.
Recommended.
Firstly, it’s a collection of stories about AIDS, and boy, if that wasn’t a weird book to be reading at the start of quarantine in this pandemic. I felt like I was transported back in time, back to another disease that people didn’t understand, that people used as a weapon against others for the own personal gain, or bigotry.
Adam Mars-Jones, to be honest, writes lines so beautifully that I could read him write about paint dry and he presents nine stories (eight about AIDS, although some don’t even, purposely, mention the word, and the first, Slim, is a character’s personal nickname for the disease). Prescient, scary, this book is fully of relationships ending, of people trying to move on, of a real world that is distant and remote from their lives. It is a book, to put it bluntly, that is spookily about now.
Recommended.
January 29, 2015
I recently referred to this book when reviewing Kergan Edwards-Stout's Gifts Not Yet Given. The two books are similar in that they are collections of short stories which deal with individuals who are cut off, one way or another, from their families and/or friends. Both are books I can see reading and re-reading again and again. Edwards-Stout's book got me to pick up Mars-Jones' volume and re-read it, cover to cover. All the stories in Monopolies of Loss center on AIDS and its impact to the gay community back in the 1980s. They are deeply personal, and speak to me on a level that makes it impossible for me to be impersonal in any approach to this book. One of the stories, Bears in Mourning, is a story that I have recommended time and time again when the inevitable discussion comes up concerning just what a Bear is. Curiously, it is the only story in the book where the death is not AIDS related. Monopolies of Loss may seem a bit dated today, but for those of us who lived through the outbreak of the epidemic and lost so many friends to it, these stories will bring familiar faces to mind. I heartily recommend Monopolies of Loss.
Want to read
April 23, 2025Read so far:
Monopolies of loss --
*Slim --
An executor --
*A small spade --
The brake --
*Summer lightning --
*Remission --
*Bears in mourning--
*Baby clutch --
The changes of those terrible years --
***
Lantern lecture --
Trout day by pumpkin light --
Monopolies of loss --
*Slim --
An executor --
*A small spade --
The brake --
*Summer lightning --
*Remission --
*Bears in mourning--
*Baby clutch --
The changes of those terrible years --
***
Lantern lecture --
Trout day by pumpkin light --
November 11, 2008
These are hard and sharp stories from the early years of the AIDS crisis in the gay community. They display very beautifully the (sometimes bitter) grace of a community hard-pressed.
March 18, 2010
Loving writing.
December 11, 2017
This is a book I will be revisiting. It's at times incredibly emotional, but I don't see that as a fault with what this collection tries to say. Dealing with the loss of so many young men in such a short period of time is a behemoth task, and I think these stories stand up to the job. From the very first story:
"I've learned that there is a yoga of tears. There are the clever tears that release a lot in a litte time, and the stupid tears that just shake you and don't let you go. Once your shoulders get in on the act, you're sunk. The trick is to keep them out of it. Otherwise, you end up wailing all day. Those kind of tears are very more-ish. Bet you can't cry just one, just ten, just twenty. But if I keep my shoulders still I can reach a much deeper level of tears. it's like a lumbar puncture. I can draw out this fluid which is a fantastic concentrate of misery. And then just stop and be calm."
"I've learned that there is a yoga of tears. There are the clever tears that release a lot in a litte time, and the stupid tears that just shake you and don't let you go. Once your shoulders get in on the act, you're sunk. The trick is to keep them out of it. Otherwise, you end up wailing all day. Those kind of tears are very more-ish. Bet you can't cry just one, just ten, just twenty. But if I keep my shoulders still I can reach a much deeper level of tears. it's like a lumbar puncture. I can draw out this fluid which is a fantastic concentrate of misery. And then just stop and be calm."
January 4, 2025
What a gorgeous work of fiction - you forget it’s fiction, because it is so emotional and real. Written with such reverence and respect for those who lived and died through the AIDS crisis. An essential read.
June 1, 2009
Funny how a book 15 years ago set mostly 25 years ago feels so far away.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews