2023-12-14 22:38:19
Updated Thursday, December 14, 2023 – 21:38
Anthony Passeron narrates in the moving ‘The Lost Sons’ the story of the first patients of the epidemic through the memory of his uncle
Daniel Meyers, sick with AIDS, helped by his mother in Seattle, in 1993.Bromberger HooverGetty
Translated into fifteen languages, multi-award-winning and about to be adapted into the inevitable series for platforms, The Sleeping Children, the first novel by Anthony Passeron (Niza, 1983), which publishes Libros del Asteroide in Spain, is a publishing phenomenon. The key to success lies in the synthetic combination, through alternating chapters, of tremendously emotional family memories (you cry) with the Time.news of the researchers’ fight against the disease, which reads like a fast-paced scientific thriller.
The family part begins when Dsir, the writer’s uncle, contracts HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). as a result of his heroin addiction in the early 80s, when nothing was yet known about the disease. In parallel, we discovered, step by step, who were the scientists who fought against AIDS, facing the prejudices of the time, when the plague was minimized by supposedly targeting only heroin addicts and homosexuals. “Many doctors said: ‘I don’t work for fags and junkies,’ in clear contradiction with the Hippocratic Oath. And then there were positions along that line from politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen or Pope John Paul IIwho did not approve of the use of condoms…”, Passeron recalls in conversation with this newspaper.
Although the origins of the epidemic, which has already claimed 40 million lives worldwide, are in sub-Saharan Africa, in the 1920s, the first alarm signals went off on June 5, 1981, when Willy Rozenbaum, director of the infectious diseases unit of the Claude-Bernard hospital in Paris, law in an American bulletin on a rare pneumopathy detected in five men and I compared it with a case I knew. Interestingly, all six men were homosexual.
At first the syndrome seemed so specific that its first potential victims, gays and drug addicts, were dismissive of the news: “A friend of my uncle’s who took drugs with him told me that they believed it was an urban legend spread so that they would stop pricking themselves. And so same with homosexuals: ‘This is so we can go back to the closet’, they said to each other. “It was a time when they were finally starting to live without having to hide and it slowed their awareness of the extent of HIV.”
Denial in all its forms is one of the many themes that emerge from this exciting read: there is not only the “God’s punishment” intended for a supposedly marginal sector of the population, a stereotype that is still there, despite scientific evidence: “Today the majority of infections occur in heterosexual women between 40 and 60 years old.” The families of the victims also denied the reality, as they did not want to accept the diagnosis, both because of its lethal nature and because of the social stigma.
In the case of the Passerons, in a small town, the fear of what people would say was a burden. Hence the writer had to inject some fiction into his hybrid of essayistic thriller and family Time.news: “Only because my family did not want to talk about the subject did I reconstruct the story of Dsir using other testimonies in very similar situations“.
The concision of these little more than 200 pages narrated with overwhelming clarity (even for those who failed science) reminiscent of the autobiographical fictions of Annie Ernauxa confessed influence: “Beyond the precision, because, in each novel, she focused on a particular topic, such as abortion or domestic violence, she influenced me because she was a writer capable of convincing the reader that he also has a story to tell”.
In the case of The Sleeping Children that Passeron has awakened for all of us, that witness is rigorously real: all families have secrets, silenced stories, relatives who do not know very well what they died from because it could not be said. Thanks to this exciting novel, everything works out.
In its day, the emotional component also affected the scientists who led the research against all odds, even fighting among themselves, because they had never felt so close to their patients, whom they used as guinea pigs in successive experiments that ended in death. frustrating failures. In this scientific thriller, there is everything: ego battles, and economic and political subplots.
Both the governments of the United States and France launched the campaign when they had not yet found a cure: “For the governments, the priority was to demonstrate who was the strongest, the medical issue took a backseat. It was almost a joke.” that in France a medicine that had only been in testing for two weeks was announced as a panacea… And that is something that they wanted to forget. The doctors, both American and French, who boasted of having found the cure before its time have kept their prestige intact.“.
The Cold War was a clear determining factor: “Although it was French doctors who discovered the virus, since they had the idea of looking for it in the lymph nodes while the Americans continued searching in the blood, there was an agreement between Reagan and Chirac to say that it had been a joint discovery. That is why disease detection tests such as ELISA were patented so that the profits were 50% for their respective laboratories. The economy also affected the patients because in France social security covered the treatments while in the United States They were much less protected in that sense… Nowadays, In Africa, people keep dying because there are not enough means to pay for the treatments. “Medicine and economics have never been a good marriage.”
“At least work continues to improve treatments,” Passeron concludes: “Although the vaccine remains a pipe dreambecause it is an extremely complex virus, in 25 years we have gone from 30 pills a day to one or more one injection every two months. From a treatment that, in its day, was almost unsustainable, especially for people who were already very deteriorated, to something much more bearable. The scientific dimension was what allowed my family novel to not be so sad. It was the way to give it a happy ending. Beginning in January 1996, after reaching the peak of the plague [5.000 muertos en Espaa slo en 1995]”, and in just three months doctors went from palliative treatments to curing a chronic disease.”
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