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“Sleeping Children” by Anthony Passeron recounts the loneliness of families who had to face AIDS in the 1980s. A family story, a dazzling first novel.
Désiré is the eldest son of a respectable family in the hinterland of Nice. Rather than killing himself at work in his parents’ butcher’s shop, he prefers a life of celebration and heroin, which he enjoys like all his friends in the early 1980s. And gets infected. He meets a woman he marries and continues to shoot. Together they have a daughter. She is also a carrier of the virus.
A very strong novel
Faced with the disease, relatives react as they can. Denial, shame, silence or anger. Anthony Passeron tells a family story mixed with the journey of French researchers working on HIV, and skilfully slips from history to his story. His simple writing immerses us in a race once morest death. A complete, fluid and very strong first novel.
“Sleeping children”, by Anthony Passeron, ed. Globe, 288 pages, 20 euros.