The Thread

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.