“Sewn for you”, by Mathias Howald, Scribes, 216 p., €20.
A nurse notes him in passing, while the author, who has come for tests after a condom accident, tells her that he is working on a book devoted to AIDS: “We don’t talk about AIDS anymore, at least not in Switzerland. » This silence is undoubtedly one of the reasons that led Mathias Howald to write Sewn for you. He had to come back to this epidemic which constituted the distressing backdrop of his adolescence and his entry into sexuality. He also had to revive the memory of those she took away, these men and women, often younger than he is today (he was born in 1979), whose forgetfulness would seem to him an offense. additional.
As a teenager, he had discovered a rite set up by certain relatives of patients consisting of sewing together pieces of fabric to remember the name and the life of AIDS victims. The novel is a way of prolonging this gesture in and through literature. Rather than fabrics, Mathias Howald assembles texts with different statuses and genres: memories, autofiction, fictional essays, newspaper extracts, letters…
sewn for you thus weaves two eras. The first part mainly concerns the year 1994 and looks back on the author’s life as a high school student (in his canton, we say “gymnast”). What he reads, listens to, watches, his attraction for men, which undoubtedly leads him to be particularly attentive to programs on AIDS, which he records on video cassette – the only ones or almost where it is a question of ‘homosexuality. In one of them, he discovers the Names Project and the practice of patchworks through a report on Alexander, who has lost his lover. The text then branches off to imagine the days of this bereaved man. Coming back to Mathias and the “I”, the last pages of this first part project him to the summer of 1998, when he attended the first Gay Pride organized in Lausanne.
It is twenty years later that the second act of the novel opens, which runs until 2021 and covers the period during which he works at Sewn for you. After having stopped teaching, he wrote, tried to find out more about a friend of his parents who had died of AIDS, immersed himself in his memories and in the Names Project, exchanged with survivors worried about the disappearance of the memory of their dead.
Between the two parts, when so many things seem to have changed, circulate motifs (the cough), songs (the album Grace, by Jeff Buckley, 1994), ghosts, such as that of the father, who died young (Mathias Howald devoted his first novel to him, Inherit the silence, On the other hand, 2018), or that of the writer Guillaume Dustan (1966-2005). Mathias met him in 1998, at Gay Pride, during a debate on the existence of gay literature. In the second part, he rereads his work (republished in two volumes by POL), found in Nicholas Pages (Balland, 1999) a few lines on the writer’s time in Lausanne.
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