The interview is here ⤵️
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Inspired by real events, the first novel byAnthony Passeronwho is a professor at Vocational High School Vauban of Niceis one of the successes of the literary season (it is in the top 15 best sellers, Fnac novel prize).
His uncle, drug addict and HIV positivelived in the Haut-Pays Nice
This novel mixes the story of AIDS with the intimate story of his family, one of whose members – his uncle Désiré – was one of “ sleeping children » that we found in the streets of Old Nice, drugged and therefore HIV-positive, in the 1980s.
A way of telling the global AIDS epidemic and drug addictionview from high country of Nice. At a time when the gossip was going well, and when was far from advanced medicine in the face of disease.
For three months, he has been invited everywhere. Festivals, book signings … he is still Sunday October 9 to Mouans-Sartoux Book Festival
. And the October 22 at a signing at Fnac in Nice.
In this interview
The Côte d’Azur has long been a heroin hub
My uncle was part of this generation of people from the hinterland, rather wealthy, who went down to study on the Côte d’Azur and who will encounter different cultural practices from his village. This youth wanted to take full advantage
At that time, objective knowledge about the virus was lacking and this lack of knowledge was going to have an even greater resonance in villages where, in the end, everything was known about each other’s practices.
One of the driving forces behind writing this novel was to write a personal story that I knew was collective
The Covid? I did not think that 40 years later, after the story of AIDS in France, I did not think that we could still consider that there were sick and dead people who were more guilty than ‘others
Doctors have been fired from their hospitals for being interested in this virus and having brought back a homosexual drug-addicted patient population that some hospital governing bodies did not want to see in consultations
A podcast around history, this history? It’s an old dream. I would have to find the time because I was thinking about that. I have met other doctors who have gone through the epidemic in quite different sectors and who really have things to tell.
I really want to make a podcast or an audio documentary really on the Côte d’Azur history of the epidemic, I appeal
I think it’s one of the things that will have to be archived somewhere. Individual testimonials. And not only. I would like there to be academics who join the project. I also need individual memories, that is to say sensitivity.
What interests me is not so much the collective phenomena in the historical sense of the term, it is how these phenomena strike the intimacy of lives.
There is a beautiful audio documentary to be made
Anthony Passeron, The Sleeping Children. Globe publishing
.