Forty years after his uncle died of AIDSAnthony Passeron (Nice, 1983) digs into family secrets and reconstructs part of his pastbut at the same time recounts the beginnings, the fight against the AIDS virus and the awakening of a monster in French and American hospitals.
The sleeping children (Asteroid Books) is the The author’s first novel, where he mixes chronicles and memoirs with scientific research developed around the virus. The author chatted with MILLENNIUM.
How did you decide that in order to tell your family story you had to address the AIDS pandemic?
When I decided to tell the story of my grandmother’s shame and denial about my uncle, I thought that people would not fully understand it if I did not highlight the context of social violence that was being experienced with the arrival of drugs and AIDS in the village. That is why it was important to narrate the global context of what was happening so that the reader could understand the intimate violence that was being experienced. In short, the book is the result of the silence that was kept in my family for years.
Was it difficult to delve into the past?
I I wanted to tell the story of my family and my uncle so that it would not disappear.disappear, and somehow show that Désiré’s life was part of everything that was happening in the world at that moment. I think it was the only way to free herself from sadness and shame.
It’s practically two novels in one. Do you see it that way?
Yes. With the scientific part was easy to create a suspense with this scientific progression of doctors, specialists, a kind of thriller, People want to read on to find out how things turned out. While in the family part, the most personal, it is more difficult and it will take more time for the reader to grasp the character or characters that I address, so the two novels, as you say, feed off each other in a certain way.
The sleeping children tells, on the one hand, the investigation around a virus of which no one knew what it was or where it came from. The reader joins the race to discover what happens in laboratories and hospitals, and bears witness to the loneliness suffered by patients and their families at a time when heroin use was on the rise. For all these reasons, the book received important awards, such as the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Post and the Prix Première Plume.
Is the family part a way of sensitizing the reader to how terrible that pandemic was?
I think so, because in reality What I wanted to say is that AIDS not only contaminates bodies, the virus destroys everything.: the body, the emotional and social relationships, the intimate relationships and lives that stopped because of it. That is why I describe the tests, the research, the care and treatment of the sick, sometimes very discriminatory, or what some people feel and I show the disdain of the health authorities towards what I call in the book “the new plague.”
Is there a spirit of denunciation in The Sleeping Children?
Denouncing is something I had in mind when writing, but the most important thing for me is to leave the reader free and to let him be shocked or not. I want you to ask yourself questions and feel the story around the discoveries, misinformation and everything that happened.
Did you exorcise any demons by talking about what happened in your family?
Absolutely. I grew up in a family that left my uncle Désiré behind, they didn’t want to talk much about this character anymore, and for me, writing the book and recovering this story was also like a step from childhood to adulthood on a family level, It was like saying: “I am an adult, I am 40 years old and I can already talk about whatever I want and my family already considers me an adult.” that she has the right to talk about it, even if no one else talks about what happened.” At some point they stopped talking to me for telling the story, but well, your family will never be satisfied with you and I always knew it was a risk to write the novel, but it was a risk I had to take and its success means that I was right.
