Sleeping Children, Anthony Passeron
Sleeping Children (Les Enfants Endormis) is an intimate work of autofiction that recounts the heroin and AIDS crisis of the 1980s in a small community in southern France. Part autobiographical and part fictional reconstruction, the story follows the life of Passeron's uncle, Désiré, a heroin addict who fell victim to the virus and became the shame of the family in the years following his death. Grappling with their choice to blot out Désiré’s past, Passeron writes in the epilogue that the decision to bring light to his family history is “the fruit of their silence.”
We meet Désiré as a young man, intelligent and charismatic, who slips into addiction after an introduction to heroin on a trip to Amsterdam. Unrecognisable to his family, he joins the masses of drug-addicted young people found unconscious on streets in towns and cities across Europe, known as “sleeping children,” and soon contracts HIV from the use of infected needles. His illness plunges the once-respected family into turmoil and disrepute, and the story follows the ways in which various family members deal with their pain.
Interlaced with Désiré’s narrative is an account of the French doctors and researchers who first raised the alarm of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and brought it to international attention. These bulletin-like sections add rising tension alongside the decline of Désiré, creating an image of the forgotten figures who fought to find a treatment and for their efforts to be taken seriously by medical and scientific communities.
Written in a direct and plain prose style, the novel lays bare the suffering of many individuals and families in the face of addiction and disease; it doesn’t need to be embellished by language or narrative structure – the devastation speaks for itself. The emotional weight behind this story largely comes from the gradual realisation that, despite the rapid medical breakthroughs charted in the alternating chapters, lives like Désiré’s are destined to silently recede and become another tragic statistic.
Until the very end, the family’s private grief remains at odds with their public embarrassment and stoicism, largely down to the pervasive stigma around AIDS that existed during this decade. It’s hard to forget the impact that the now iconic photo of a gloveless Princess Diana shaking hands with a HIV/AIDS patient in 1987 had on changing general attitudes towards the disease, and just how entrenched the fear and misinformation surrounding sufferers of the virus was until that point. Recalibrating shame is at the heart of this novel and, in doing so, Passeron colours the washed-out memory of his uncle and keeps it alive. It’s a beautiful testament to the power of storytelling.
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