Meruane, Lina. Viajes virales. Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2012. 312 pp. Catastrophic illness and the ways it bears upon both personal and cultural life is the emblematic theme of contemporary Chilean writer Lina Meruane (b. 1970). Her two most recent novels, Fruta podrida (2007) and Sangre en el ojo (2012), conscript in different ways her own struggle with diabetes. Now, in the elegant critical study Viajes virales, she turns to the scourge of AIDS to analyze how Spanish American writers have represented AIDS since its outbreak in Latin America in 1983. Fruta podrida, which allegorizes Chile as a diabetic teen who rebels against a coercive medical establishment, is a furiously partisan book. In it, Meruane inveighs against Chile's sellout to a global capitalism she sees as malevolent. Although Meruane's political views occasionally color Viajes virales, in the main she is objective in appraising the scores of AIDS-related works she surveys. Beyond bringing together this corpus of what she calls textos seropositivos, a contribution in itself, her study demonstrates how much Latin Americans' ways of thinking about AIDS have been shaped by broader trends--neoliberalism and the consumer culture it promotes; resistance to dictatorships in the Southern Cone; the collapse of Cuban socialism during the Periodo Especial; and the technological revolution. Meruane finds a remarkable crossover of metaphors from ideologically fraught fields--most especially neoliberal economics and politics--into the novels, plays and autobiographical vignettes whose authors, over a period of thirty years, conceptualize the epidemic and assign it meaning. Following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag, she uncovers in the discourse writers use to depict the illness a complex set of cultural prejudices and beliefs. Many of these beliefs bespeak (and renegotiate) assumptions about the relationship of nation to male sexual dissidents, the group most devastated by AIDS. Meruane divides her study into two parts, the first a chronological overview of the epidemic and the second a focused look at works that exemplify particular facets of AIDS texts. Although Part I, "Bitacora de un viaje seropositivo," treats many of the same works that anchor her discussion in chapters later in the book, the two parts complement one another usefully. Among the works she examines most closely are Severo Sarduy's Pajaros de la playa (1993), Pedro Lemebel's Loco afan (1996), Reinaldo Arenas's El color del verano o Nuevo jardin de las delicias (1999), and Mario Bellatin's Salon de belleza (2000). Meruane's title refers not just to HIV's circulation through Latin America or to her own journey through AIDS-related texts, but more importantly to two stages in the experience of the continent's male sexual dissidents. …