![]() ![]() And while Makkai herself is too young to have lived as an adult through the years of all-consuming apprehension that characterised Aids in the 1980s, there’s a huge commitment here to telling a truthful story of what it was like to do so. His friend Yale speaks of “entire apartment buildings devastated”, the language another suggestion that the disease tearing through excitable lives is akin to a targeted attack in wartime. The Great Believers begins in 1985 with Nico’s funeral. It’s a timely reminder that living through crisis, whether personal or political – and sometimes both – sends shockwaves across generations. ![]() “There had been a holocaust, a mass murder of neglect and antipathy,” she feels. The wartime imagery is surely deliberate, though the setting is Paris in 2015, and she’s looking back at the Aids epidemic in Chicago that claimed her elder brother Nico, and many friends. E arly in Rebecca Makkai’s stylish and ambitious new novel, one of her protagonists, Fiona, is pondering life in her 50s. ![]()
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May 2023
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