The Thread - Softcover

Bourdin, Christophe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1805680390 ISBN 13: 9781805680390

Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics, 2027

Synopsis

A hauntingly powerful and moving lost classic of AIDS literature, translated into English for the first time.

“Terribly powerful... The style and structure are stunning.” —Télérama

Christophe Bourdin was certain he would be the author of a single book. Diagnosed HIV-positive at the height of the epidemic in Paris, he began writing the exquisitely beautiful, painfully intense pages that would become The Thread, a singular work that blends vivid testimony with inventive literary style and currents of dream and fantasy.

It begins with the hypochondriac days: days of obsessive hygiene, of microscopic attention to potential contamination, of seeing dangers everywhere. In serpentine sentences that capture the frenzied paranoia of the time, Bourdin recreates the consciousness of a young gay man whose world has suddenly become charged with threat. As he withdraws increasingly into his protective rituals, he learns he has contracted the virus, and his mind splits into compulsive scanning for signs of decline and fantasies of escaping his fate.

With his illness becoming manifest, the man writes a diary to record the passing of his final days. In searingly immediate entries, he describes haunting encounters with friends and family, brief moments of respite and release in the city, and his own warring impulses of acceptance and denial.

First published in 1994, The Thread was recently rediscovered in France and is appearing in English for the first time in a stunning translation by the prize-winning Jeffrey Zuckerman. Lucid and moving, it is an essential lost classic of AIDS literature.

About this title

About the Author

Christophe Bourdin was born in Épinal, France in 1964. As a young literature student in Paris, he learned that was HIV-positive and began to write a journal. Over the next several years, this text would become the autobiographical novel, The Thread, which was first published in 1994. Highly acclaimed, it was republished in 1996, and sections from the novel were read on the radio and on stage for World AIDS Day that year. Bourdin died in 1997, aged 32.

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator of books by the artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dardenne brothers, the queer writers Jean Genet and Hervé Guibert, and the Mauritian novelists Ananda Devi and Shenaz Patel. He has won the French Voices Grand Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and, for the entirety of his work, he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

You foresaw dangers everywhere.

You never, if the sky darkened in the slightest, went outside without carrying an umbrella or covering up. You took note, through the windows, of the trees’ bending, the branches’ swishing, the leaves’ fluttering at the winds’ behest. On the street, passersby pulled the lapels of their raincoats upright; others tugged the hems of their coats down; the drizzle plastered hair to foreheads; water flowed along roofs and flooded pavements; streams formed in gutters and channels; puddles spread across pavements;

you worried about the temperature; you stared at thermometer stems flush with mercury; you saw condensation form on panes, frost etch minute geometries there; through the glass, you saw the horizon brim with clouds, the distance dim with storms gathering then breaking up, fine rain mottle the expanse and showers wipe out the city. Snow fall, winter.

You knew the colors, the names of clouds.

You swaddled yourself, safeguarding your head, your ears, your throat, your chest against bad weather, heavy gusts, night’s damp and cold’s sting, pulling on caps, hoods, hats, checking straps, fastening Velcro, snapping shut press studs, tugging tight drawstrings, tying knots under your chin; you buttoned up, you flipped your collars; around your neck you wound long, thick, heavy scarves; you felt exposed to threats, to likely problems, open to attacks of every sort;
you liked solid, warm materials, wool and down, tartan, sturdy duffel, bulky canvas, durable cloth, chunky knits, padded jackets; you donned fabrics of every sort; you always wore layers, stacking tee shirts, button-downs, sweaters, jackets, reinforcing defenses, erecting, tight around your body, a malleable envelope, a home. A welcoming hearth that would keep you warm.

You took care not to lay your palms flat just anywhere; in every open space, at government offices, on public transit, down pathways, you inspected seats, benches on which you might sit, for their cleanliness. You presumed their contamination by innumerable others passing through. At checkouts, at ticket windows, at counters where you had to rest your elbows, Formica and stainless steel shone: still bearing the faint gleam of fingerprints, streaks, traces left on the surface by all who came before you. You cast off habits that struck you as dangerous, imagined guarantees, precautions, reflexes that could protect you. At times you dreamed of invisible gloves, permanent ones, to be worn as a second skin.

The least touch unnerved you, had you not asked for it, agreed to it first, been given the time to judge that it was at a safe remove and not a clear and present risk to your health;
you were afraid of queues, masses, teeming multitudes, stampedes, being drawn into hordes, their unpredictability on sidewalks, in arcades, or along platforms; you were terrified of narrow, busy spaces, groups, the logjam of stores, main streets, and some neighborhoods, office and building exits, morning and evening rush, métro and train stations; you kept a careful distance from crowds, places where people gathered, veering off to stay apart; you pressed through clusters, agglomerations, the flow of bodies, any human tide, in a rush;

you heard coughs and saw colds; you feared wheezes and fled sneezes; inside trains, elevators, buses, and métros, a traveler, a rider beside you, standing or sitting on a bench or fold-down seat, or outside a commuter keeping shoulder to shoulder with you, getting close or leaning in toward you, began clearing their throat or sniffling or trying to blow their nose, and you automatically held your breath, turned your head, pulled back as if to dodge a punch, or hastened, should you be walking and should they be just ahead, your step; you often wondered about the wind speed and direction; you outpaced the coughing fits and microbes that you were sure might have been passed on to you; only once you were far enough away did you let yourself release the breath you had forced yourself to hold.

(Many years later, likewise, you would clench your diaphragm when, at the hospital, you walked past the room where bronchoscopies were done, apparently believing that viruses could, as in those cartoons and comics that depicted a smell of smoke or gas or perfume with a ribbon winding through the air, fill specific areas, poison the hallway you were traversing, you who had been looking at the contagion, refusing to breathe so no germ might enter through your oral and nasal passages.)

At times, others might strike you as hostile, foul like a toxic substance; you could feel revolted by a hobo in the street, a sickly old man, a hoarse soul, a baby, a child with a stuffy nose or a sore throat, a passerby with the flu, someone visibly or even just potentially sick. You were vigilant.

You thought, more than once, that you were on the verge of insanity.

Under tablecloths, at restaurants, at other people’s places, you discreetly, so nobody might notice, wiped, with a clean cloth, a napkin, a handkerchief, the silverware, plates, glasses, and bowls that you were uncertain had been properly rinsed off; if you could or if they let you, you always washed anew, or asked to replace, whichever dishes bore spots or bumps that you deemed questionable;

you declined, at cafeterias, at markets, to be served had you not seen for yourself the quality of the offerings; you refused, unless you had been asked upfront, to let others portion out anything on your behalf; you politely turned down or, once home, threw away anything dubious, bruised fruit, goods that would soon rot, anything that seemed off or not fresh, whatever looked to be going to seed, everything that had fallen on the ground; you monitored the meat’s preparation closely, avoided consuming ground beef, pork, charcuterie; you checked packaging for sell-by dates, followed instructions to the letter, and adhered strictly to use-by dates;
you washed your hands conscientiously, repeating the process no fewer than twenty times each day, frequently replacing hand and dish towels (just as you did pillowcases, sheets, underwear); you took countless long showers, brimming hot baths; you never put your fingers in your mouth anymore.

Hygiene would protect you.

An urge frequently came over you: the need to clean. You noticed belongings piling up, your clothes scattered everywhere, a new mess each week, crammed drawers, heaps of papers littered across the desk. You impulsively tidied up the disarray in your bedroom. Impeccably. As if it could have, beyond its material presence, symbolized some other fragmentation, your own powerlessness to set the events of your life in a straightforward order, to organize them, reconcile them, harmonize them. You ran rags over surfaces, across the edges of furniture and possessions, you vacuumed up the dust on carpets, cleared away waste, opened windows, thumped bolsters, shook out linens; you sorted files, made even stacks. Lastly, after one or two hours, you went, standing on a chair or crouching on the ground, through the rows of volumes on your bookcases, their smooth and shiny spines lined up perfectly, the notebooks neatly together, boxes and containers now in a trim tower; you took in the uniformity and renewed order. Balance regained. At that point you yourself felt pristine again. Just like this tidied room. Just as clean. Your life, in those moments, felt right and proper. Level.

Because you would have liked that each day following on all those preceding might fit neatly into a steady progression, that no accident might disrupt the forward march of your life, the arc of your fate; you would have liked that every decision you made might logically follow from previous decisions, that the hours succeeding one after another might be connected, as if agreed to, and not simply adjacent, each abutting the last, and perhaps even that the future might always recall the present.

(You, in childhood, were drawn to whatever seemed akin to known things, whatever reproduced old things, whatever went together, regularity, reruns, life’s recurring events, cycles, seasons returning, the comfort of renewal, shop goods in even rows, arrayed jars, matching stacks and groups, not to mention sprawling, swelling collections of things, and vocabularies, inventories, totals, aggregates, whatever attempted to exhaust reality, seemed capable of enclosing the world, encyclopedias that contained the universe, dictionaries that collected all the words of a language, alphabetized address books that collated friends’ contact details, so many files, registries, class rosters, phone directories for a city, a département, a région, almanacs, calendars, diaries and planners gifted on the first of January and covering the entire year, and, especially, catalogs in which, page by page, one could tally up all the clothes, from jackets to shoes, all the items, tools, utensils of every sort, domestic appliances, furniture, toys, gadgets categorized, arranged by use, with an index at the end; you hefted the tome, you curled up in a chair, you turned the leaves one by one, you examined the images contained within, numerals, digits sped past, you scrutinized what, in your eyes, amounted to an unchanging, complete set. A totality.)

Edition details

• Publisher: Pushkin Press Classics
• Publication date: 2027
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1805680390
• ISBN 13: 9781805680390
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176