Hanna Bervoets: “If I had been born twenty years earlier, many of my friends would have died of AIDS”

Striking coincidence. Like Anthony Passeron, discovered in September with “Les Enfants endormis” (Globe), the Dutch Hanna Bervoets, noted author of the chilling “Les Choses que nous a vus” (ed. Le Bruit du monde), was born at the very beginning of the 1990s. 1980; like the French writer, she devotes her latest novel, “L’Expérience Helena”, to the AIDS years; and like him, she chose to do so by interweaving two narrative threads. Passeron alternated the story of the outbreak of the virus in his family, through the figure of his drug addict uncle, and the epic of medical research in Parisian and American laboratories.

Hanna Bervoets, she weaves the true story of the Russian scientist Ilya Ivanov who, in the 1920s, wanted to create a human-ape hybrid and that, fictional, of a certain Helena Frank (we almost hear “Frankenstein”) who , in 1994, in HIV-ravaged New York, seeks to replicate Ivanov’s experiment in order to find a cure for the virus. The narrator, Felix, a young homosexual Dutchman who went to study in the United States, meets the famous and disturbing Helena when she has just been suspended by the university because of her unorthodox work.

Captivating, sometimes flirting with the fantastic, “The Helena Experience” very accurately restores an epidemic era made of shame and terror kills. A part of our collective history which literature seizes today