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Book Review: Anthony Passeron, Sleeping Children image

Book Review: Anthony Passeron, Sleeping Children

S1 ยท Books Up Close: The Podcast
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In this episode, I review Anthony Passeron's Sleeping Children (2022/5). These book reviews will drop into the feed in between interviews. You can also find the review on the YouTube channel. Go subscribe if you haven't already!

You can buy Sleeping Children your local bookstore or Bookshop.org.

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Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.

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Transcript

Introduction to 'Books Up Close'

00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close. My name is Chris Lloyd. I'm not going to say this in every review, but I am releasing these reviews in both video form on YouTube and in the podcast feed. So please subscribe to both.
00:00:16
Speaker
Subscribe to the YouTube channel, subscribe to the podcast on your favourite podcast platform, and then you will never miss these reviews as well as my conversations with writers about their work. The reviews I'll do in between will probably be writers that I'm not going talking to anytime soon, however much I would love to.
00:00:34
Speaker
But hopefully we can cover a spread of writers that way.

Overview of 'Sleeping Children' by Anthony Passeron

00:00:37
Speaker
In this episode, I want to talk briefly about Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron. Now I got a beautiful proof last year.
00:00:47
Speaker
I think it's now out. Yeah, I think it came out at the beginning of March in the UK. This book was big in France in 2022 when it first came out. Just double checking. Yes, 2022. and then it's recently been translated into English. In his bio, it says that this is a novel, but in the French tradition of Annie Ayrnod, who's quoted on the front of this, and Edouard Louis and all those kinds of people,
00:01:12
Speaker
This is a book that blurs fact and fiction and kind of moves mainly through the kind of auto fictional world, at least in the fact that it's not like a straight up traditional memoir, but it is writing about life in really complicated ways. And the book is kind of has a really beautiful, the book has a really beautiful structure that I think works incredibly well for the subject matter.

Interweaving Personal and Global Narratives

00:01:34
Speaker
Basically, we move between the protagonist who is Anthony Passeron and he is describing in his little French village the kind of growing epidemic of heroin abuse and death eventually and how this affects part of his family when his uncle gets hooked on heroin and so does his
00:01:57
Speaker
Girlfriend. That storyline is then intercut with the HIV-AIDS pandemic, right, as that is spreading across America and Europe and other places.
00:02:09
Speaker
And that section of the story is basically a kind of, like, historiography, if you like, of the AIDS crisis and the medical profession's response to it. So we follow, in particular, French doctors as they are trying to grapple with what HIV and AIDS will eventually be called, right? They're like in the early stages when it has lots of different names, people think it's different things.
00:02:32
Speaker
The medical establishment is trying to work out what it is and how you might treat it. And you've got these French doctors who are in dialogue with and sometimes clashing with doctors in America who are doing very different things.
00:02:42
Speaker
And that storyline is a really evocative and emotional storyline, even though it's quite plainly reported, right? Like if it was just published as one essay, it would be a very straight history of medicine and its response to the HIV AIDS crisis.
00:02:59
Speaker
crisis, but instead, because it is intercut with this familial drama and the way that HIV and AIDS then kind of makes itself known in Passeron's family, that intercut, the kind of interplay between the two sections make both of them more emotional somehow.
00:03:17
Speaker
Each chapter is very short, just a couple of pages, and we're kind of shifting back and forth. And at the beginning, I thought, oh, this is going to really frustrate me or annoy me. It's going to kind of get in the way. I want one story or the other. But actually the point of the book is that these two stories are entwined and you can't separate them, right? The local story, the familial story, is inseparable from this global one.
00:03:37
Speaker
That the global understanding of this pandemic and the way that people are treating it, talking about it, the kind of cultural ramifications of it, the language around it, the discourses around it, that is inseparable from the way it is felt in individual people's lives.
00:03:53
Speaker
And I think we have a quite a big canon now, I guess, of HIV and AIDS writing from America in particular and kind of from Britain

A Unique French Perspective on HIV-AIDS

00:04:02
Speaker
as well. But it's good to have more from other places like France, for instance, like this felt different. And the kind of French perspective on the medicalisation, the treatment of HIV and AIDS felt useful and helpful.
00:04:15
Speaker
Refreshing to me anyway, I guess I haven't read tons, but it felt like another way into the story and the dialogue. And for that reason, I think it's worth reading. But also the emotional gut punch of it is just huge. And the writing is beautiful. The translation is by Frank Nguyen.
00:04:31
Speaker
Gotta shout out translators.

Recommendation and Call to Action

00:04:32
Speaker
the The translation is beautiful and it is really, really worth a read. So if you can go find it, please do. It will be of interest to anyone interested in queer writing or writing about illness or writing about HIV AIDS or just French literature generally or the kind of autofictional mode or even just people who are interested in literary form and what it can do.
00:04:52
Speaker
this is a book that you will enjoy, I think. And enjoy is a loose word, but you will get something really profound from it. I highly, highly recommend. It's called Sleeping Children by Anthony Passeron. Go get it.
00:05:04
Speaker
Until the next time, let me know what you're reading. Please do in all of the ways you can find ways of telling me about that. Happy reading. Look after each other. Stay well and see you soon. Thank you for listening to this episode.
00:05:16
Speaker
Please subscribe if you haven't already, leave a review and share with people you know. You can also follow the show and me on Instagram at Books Up Close and on YouTube. And if you can, please do fill out the feedback form linked in the show notes.
00:05:30
Speaker
It's really helpful to us. You can get show transcripts and more information by subscribing to the Substack. This show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the University of Hertfordshire and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.